You tell ’em Mike. You tell ’em all. barqs has bite!

It reminds me of the NAACP and UNCF – two organizations which cannot possibly exist, considering there are no longer Negroes nor Coloured People in the United States; they moved out when the African Americans moved in. Who will collect the college scholarships? Who needs advancing?

(‘Racial slurs’ above are not intended as racial slurs; I’m merely deconstruction the blindly repeated acronyms further above. I have no idea what this week’s accepted autosegratory label could possibly be, and refuse to speculate)

Though… it must be a state, otherwise the US only has 49 states.
Besides, Pennsylvania has state parks, which wouldn’t make sense if there were no state.
They even have a Department of State which has a State Athletic Commission. Not to mention their State Museum.
It sounds like plenty of people, even within your own State… er… Commonwealth government are confused.

Err, it’s a bit more complicated than that (and the net-of-a-thousand-lies is even more pathetically wrong than usual, so I’ll start there).

If you ask google you’ll get two interesting, but wrong results (plus a lot of chaff). The long one is at yahoo, and it quotes the other, at About: that there is no difference. Ridiculous.

First: The United States of America is constituted of the “several states” — that is, sovereign lands (in other words, “states” as we use the term in foreign affairs — hence the “department of state” who handles the US’s “statehood” abroad) who chose to cede certain sovereign powers for all the reasons listed in the preamble to the US constitution.

We often forget this because we are used to throwing around the term “state” for a region like Colorado which doesn’t have much foreign policy (and can’t, under Article 1, Section 10 anyway). But they are States (despite the largely successful federal efforts to squash their independence), and the Supreme Court has resisted (at times more or less vigorously) attempts to “reduce the states to mere administrative regions” (in the words of a famous decision which I can’t find on line this second). In fact you can see vestigial traces of their “independence” in Governors’ ability to issue clemency, the need for extradition and explicit treaties between states, etc. County leaders can’t do any of those things.

Whew. So each of the four commonwealths, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia is a sovereign state in its own right.

What makes a commonwealth different? Well, I was educated in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, and we were told that trials in the commonwealths could cite common law precedent from before the US existed, while the other states could not. I really can’t tell you if this is the case for Kentucky, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, but it is definitely the case in Massachusetts. In fact it applies in a bunch of places; for example I attended The Roxbury Latin School which isn’t really incorporated like most organisations in the US; instead it has a royal charter from Charles II (check out its founding principles). (bonus quiz: Harvard, founded by the same bunch, is incorporated in a unique fashion. How?)

BTW I believe Louisiana only severed its link with the Code Napoléon within the last decade…but people born there even today can still become French citizens if they want.

So the loser lawyer at About.com is looking at things from only a federal standpoint, he could technically, if pointlessly, be correct. Commonwealths are states.

Of course there’s another meaning of “commonwealth” which was mentioned here: it’s an acceptable term (for a republic like the USA) for “colony.”

Interestingly there’s a different, related sense: (most of) the now mostly independent former British colonies are joined in a “commonwealth” instead of Empire, empires becoming declassé in the mid-20th century; many of them are themselves “commonwealths” in their own stead. For example, I was born in a State(!) of the Commonwealth of Australia (who has a Queen, Elizabeth); it is part of The Commonwealth, and later I was educated in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (which is a republic).

What do they have in “common” as it were? “Commonwealth” is just what it sounds like: the wealth or value or interests that we have in common (“common wealth” or more commonly “common weal”): the reason, after all that people form associations or states!