Watching the Olympics is a bit of a geography lesson. It's a reminder that there are lots of countries out there, including a lot of countries that are too well-behaved to get noticed most of the time.
It also comes up that a lot of countries have official names that are longer than the names we normally call them. You see an abreiviation like "RSA" and try to figure out what that is by sounding it out. Rosesia? Rasalla? No, it's "Republic of South Africa."
Sometimes the long form is well known. For instance, most people know that China is officially the "People's Republic of China." Fortunately most of them don't use the entire name, even in the Olympics. So we don't have to remember that Venezuela is really the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."
Unlike most countries, Canada doesn't have a flowery full name - it really is just called "Canada." In older media you sometimes hear people call it "The Dominion of Canada," but that name was never made into the official name. And since "dominion" is a name for part of the British Empire, its use has disappeared as Canada has come to view itself as more independent.
Maybe we should get a nice long impressive ceremonial name. I don't think we'd want to go with "Dominion of Canada," since most of us associate that word with either grocery stores or the bad guys from Deep Space Nine. I'll just peruse the list of countries at Wikipedia. Australia is the "Commonwealth of Australia." That's pretty good, but it's confusing with the British Commonwealth. I see Bolivia is the "Plurinational State of Bolivia." I'm not even sure what that means; they probably just invented the word, "plurinational" to excuse a lack of national unity. I can't believe we didn't think of that. So how about it: The Optionational Multicountry of Canada.
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