Examples. Were you born on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination? When you learned arithmetic, did you figure out that you were born 5 months after your parents’ wedding? Had you always been told that you’d been born-and-raised in Texas, only to find that you were born in Boston?

My birth certificate says that I was born in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Yes, that’s the full, legal name of the country’s tiniest state. Not many people know this. I do, because my birth certificate says so.