>I think it also had something to do with the quota systems. Aha! We have a .016% Zimbabwian ethnicity in Toronto. We better make sure that our police and fire services are also .016% Zimbabwian. And everybody else in the service sectors maybe should have to go on diversity training to find out how to deal with that .016% in case they ever meet such a person. I think that's the sort of nonsense they probably had in mind. Remember. Those people are bean counters, not real human beings.
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>I was very tempted to write in 'Tramalfadorian".

It was, you wouldn't believe, as much a problem in SFRY. It was built as a careful balance of nations, with word "federation" stuffed everywhere, so that nobody would even think of it ever wanting or trying to become one country, specially not the brotherhood of unity and convenience as the kingdom was. If any sort of unification was to be, it was supposed to happen in some distant future, when we all retire and anyone who remembers fears of unitary state is long buried.

Except the project of balancing nations and cultures was so successful, that a generation had grown which felt that nation is a bad word, and being a Yugoslav by nationality gave them the way out - out of being forced to pick sides, specially as the people became more and more mobile and we even had people in second or third generation of mixed marriages (mixed by nation, religion or none, and, well, gender too). So at the census of 1970 it was not really forbidden but not available as a choice either - one could pick "other" and then write "Yugoslav". In 1980 it was already there, and in 1990 more than 10% of people in Bosnia have declared themselves so.

Of course, when the stool hit the fan, each side claimed these as theirs "who were oppressed and did not dare declare themselves as Serbs/Croats/Muslims they were".