[lbo-talk] former-blah and ex-bleh

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Tue May 2 08:19:20 PDT 2006


A question for Joanna, Carrol and other language type people:

I notice a lot of people write fSU (by which I am assuming they mean former Soviet Union) or ex-USSR, etc. I can understand the use of former or ex in the case of entities that continue to exist (or were replaced by an equivalent one): ex-president Bill Clinton, my former spouse Leslie Nagsalltime. But it seems strange to use them otherwise. There is no Soviet Union today and the only Soviet Union was the former one!

What am I not getting?

I am thinking of starting an LBO FAQ, especially to clarify abbreviations and acronyms. For a long time I had no clue what a POTUS is! ;-)

--ravi

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/



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