>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!
Hey I'm ABD in English - that makes me a language-type person too!
I think the FSU refers to all the now-independent countries that used to constitute the Soviet Union. Since they're all tied to each other to some degree, given that common history, it makes sense to refer to them as the "former" something. Like the Commonwealth, which is an alumni association for the British empire, only more so.
Doug