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OK, here’s a proposed name for Dominica: “152”. Dominica would then have the distinction of being the only country in the world to have a name written in the same characters in every language, and its name could also be the same as its new international airport designation.

I got the idea from the US Postal Service, which some years ago instituted country codes for international destinations. One must still use the receiving country’s internal zone codes, of course, but the country code is supposed to ensure that the USPS at least routes the letter or parcel to the proper country in the first place.

Before the USPS instituted country codes, letters sent from the US intended to recipients in Dominica would invariably get routed to the Dominican Republic. I had one such letter returned to me twice despite the fact that I had written “not the Dominican Republic, but the Commonwealth of Dominica” on the envelope in large red capital letters, underlined for further emphasis.

You’d have to look awfully hard to find anyone dumber than the typical USPS employee. Not too long ago my wife called me on her cell phone from our town’s post office. She’s forgotten the USPS country code for Dominica, and was asking me. She had to do that because when she told the postal clerk it was not the Dominican Republic but the Commonwealth of Dominica, the clerk responded by entering the letters “com” into her terminal in search of the country code, and before she could type in the next letter the terminal would serve up “Comoros Islands”. My wife told the clerk that the Comoros Islands are in the Madagascar Channel east of Africa, nowhere the Caribbean the clerk told her not to worry, the package she was attempting to send would eventually reach Dominica! I’m not making this up.

We could even turn “152” into a marketing campaign: “In 152 we speak English. We have no baseball players in the American Major Leagues; in fact we don’t even have a baseball field in 152 – but we are the Nature Island with a number for a name.”

Of course, one problem is that only the US Postal Service, and not the postal services of other countries, uses 152 as a country code for Dominica. But then, only people in the US seem to be quite so dumb, or at least so geographically illiterate.

So that’s my modest proposal: Let’s make Dominica’s name “152”. If that seems demeaning, we could permit the 152 Postal Service give the US a country code, say “40” (symbolic of its IQ and purposely having nothing to do with anything, not even the number of its states, and definitely less than 152).

But seriously, as I advised in one comment to a post on this site, if you’re writing to anyone in Dominica from the US, it is a good idea to write under the address: “USPS Country Code 152”.

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