Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Question for Americans
Why do y'all refer to your amendments by number only? It makes them very hard to learn and seriously hinders my Jeopardy game!
3 comments:
Anonymous
said...
Well see it's a deep, dark conspiracy to confuse the poli sci students!
Seroiusly, I don't know why but it's pain the ass for those of us with memory issues. I sound like a jackass if I try to have a conversation with people who have a clue. Very annoying.
Don't worry, all our legislation has names. Even if you don't know the details of it, you'll hear people talking about "Access to Information Act" or "Accountability Act" instead of, like, "Bill C-173," so you at least know the context. It's not like when Americans say "Sixth Amendment" and I have no idea if they're talking about guns or freedom of speech or habeus corpus.
Ooh, if I wanted to make a conspiracy theory out of this, I'd say the amendements are referred to by number only to make it harder for people to be aware of what exactly their rights are.
I think it's probably because the First Amendment can't really be summed up in just a few words. It includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition and freedom of religion. That would be quite a mouthful. A lot of people just say 'freedom of speech,' but that is incomplete and 'basic freedoms' is vague. And so we just say First Amendment. If you don't know what that means, it requires you to look it up and read it. That may be by design as well. Our Founding Fathers were not dumb people. :)
3 comments:
Well see it's a deep, dark conspiracy to confuse the poli sci students!
Seroiusly, I don't know why but it's pain the ass for those of us with memory issues. I sound like a jackass if I try to have a conversation with people who have a clue. Very annoying.
...and now I have to learn a whole new system....
Don't worry, all our legislation has names. Even if you don't know the details of it, you'll hear people talking about "Access to Information Act" or "Accountability Act" instead of, like, "Bill C-173," so you at least know the context. It's not like when Americans say "Sixth Amendment" and I have no idea if they're talking about guns or freedom of speech or habeus corpus.
Ooh, if I wanted to make a conspiracy theory out of this, I'd say the amendements are referred to by number only to make it harder for people to be aware of what exactly their rights are.
I think it's probably because the First Amendment can't really be summed up in just a few words. It includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of petition and freedom of religion. That would be quite a mouthful. A lot of people just say 'freedom of speech,' but that is incomplete and 'basic freedoms' is vague. And so we just say First Amendment. If you don't know what that means, it requires you to look it up and read it. That may be by design as well. Our Founding Fathers were not dumb people. :)
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