On Sun, Nov 18, 2007 at 04:26:55AM +0000, Ron Johnson wrote:
The USPS doesn't care about entry into the union. It cares about collating and routing.
This is true. Until sometime in the twentieth century, states were addressed with more verbose abbreviations (Tex. or Penn., for example), so most, if not all, of the fifty states were present when two-letter abbreviations were assigned.
In alphabetical order: Michigan MI first 2 letters of name Minnesota MN first two non-MI letters of name Mississippi MS first two non-MI letters of name Missouri MO first two non-MS letters of name - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA
Counterexamples: your state (Louisiana, which is not LO) and mine (Texas, which is not TE, despite Tennessee being TN). Maryland is another, since MR, MY, and ML are not valid region codes for (AFAIK) any region within United States or Canada, and so under that scheme, logically those would have been assigned to Maryland first.
A better, but still untested, hypothesis is that precedence was given to pairs of letters that were present in the short abbreviations (so La. became LA, Tenn. became TN, Tex. became TX, and Md. became MD). Hence, Mich., Minn., Miss., and Mo.
-- brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US +1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only a typesetting engine: http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc/code/thwack OpenPGP: RSA v4 4096b 88AC E9B2 9196 305B A994 7552 F1BA 225C 0223 B187
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