What's In A Name?

January 25, 2006

Turin? Torino? Just where the heckfire are the Olympic Games, anyway, and whattup with the Turin/Torino thing?

If we go with the Americanized—I have a hunch the English are really to blame—version, then we also will have to refer to the famous "Shroud of Torino,” and that won't do.

I can't help noticing that the Associated Press, the arbiter of grammar and usage in pubs such as Mammoth Monthly (and, to be fair, the L.A. Times), is going with "Turin,” in spite of the fact that Bank of America, one of the big sponsors, is sticking with "Torino,” as is the U.S. Olympic Team itself.

This reminds me of a column that the late Richard O. Shirk penned on Feb. 16, 1986. Wrote he:

"Foreign place names take a horrid pounding at the hands of the Americanos, who are, after all, simply following the tradition laid down by our British cousins who considered all foreign tongues to be so much gibberish.

"The poor Italians take a ferocious lacing, and the results are universally ugly. ‘Firenze.' Now there's a musical name for you, romantic and redolent of flowers. ‘Florence?' Sheesh. We've taken lovely old Soriento and smoothed it out to Sorrento. Napoli turns up Naples. Genova works out to be Genoa. Venezia, the legendary city of the Doges, comes out Venice. One time I stared out a train window at a sign which said we were in Padova. Padova? Padua, of course, where Petruchio came to wive it wealthily and subdued the fair Katerina. Rome for Roma. Milan for Milano. The infamy goes on.

"Taking one day with the next, we don't do too badly with the Germans, although when they get into the umlauts we manage to lose track. It is particularly noted in family names, where Schon, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, becomes Schoen and even Shane. Grun gets to be Green.

"My own family name is a case in point. When Johann Scharch, from Canton Bern, a German-speaking canon in Switzerland, turned up in Berks county, Pa., back in 1729, he was naturalized as 'Shirk.' Johann was not the brainiest thing on two feet. Even without the umlauts we twist things around. Jung, for example, turns out to be Young and Brun comes up Brown.”

Well, Mr. Shirk goes on a bit about this, and if you want to read more, hit the librarian at the Cedar Rapids Gazette upside the head and demand the column from the aforementioned issue.

Meanwhile, we are going to stick with our pals at the AP and continue to go with "Turin” as the place name for the upcoming Olympics. I just hope the correct name doesn't confuse matters too much.

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