Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> andrel wrote:
> > I remember something along the lines of somebody else being appointed as 
> > a president of america before the independence war or something like that.

> Technically, since there wasn't a USA before the independence war, they'd 
> have to word the question very oddly. If they say "First American President" 
> and mean "First president on the north american continent", then it quite 
> possibly would be a native american or some such, etc.

  I might have understood this completely wrongly, or I'm remembering it
wrongly, or perhaps I'm confusing it with something else (but similar),
but I got the impression that the first time in history that any head of
state has been given the name "president" was precisely when the USA was
founded, and the title given to its first president, Washington. It wasn't
but after that that other countries followed the practice.

  (The word "president" was certainly used before that, but never for the
leader of an entire independent country.)

  Thus saying that someone else was "the first president of US/America"
has to be quite a stretch of the word "president".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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