In the 'Ask Mister History Person' category
I know it is not very common to have a nationality sticker on your car but in Europe you have to have one to be alowed to cross the borders (maybe it has changed in the past 8 years). Anyway, those stickers (oval, white background, black letters) usually make sense 'D' for Deutschland (Germany), 'USA' for, well you guessed it, but... why is Canada's sticker "CDN"?
It's not CaDaNa, is it? Any Canadians who know?
In the days before the European's arrived, Canada's native tribes referred to their geographic region as CUND, and since the U was very soft, the colonists misunderstood it and spelled it C-N-D. Whenever a CNDian would travel outside of CND, he'd identify his origin as being from "CND". Not unexpectably, they were asked to spell it: "C-N-D". Eventually, this got tiresome, and CNDians started to just spell "C-N-D" when stating their origins.
In parallel with this development, as the various English speaking colonies grew they developed their own unique accents and styles of speaking. For example, those from southern eastern seaboard would suffix every sentence with "Huh", the midwest would suffix with "ok", and the west coast with "you know". In CND, the suffix was "eh?".
Thus when CNDians were asked where they came from, they would say:
"C-eh?-N-eh?-D-eh?"
To which someone would reply, "oh, CANADA, why didn't you just say so?"
Of course this doesn't explain why the sticker is CDN and not CND. Well, the same international committee that picks airport codes ("ORD" for O'Hare, "YYC" for Calgary, "YEG" for Edmonton) also picks country codes as well. It was decided that those codes shouldn't make any sense either.
Author unknown.
