STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Drew · Gucci

Weird Bird Picture

relrel · Marc Jacobs

Drew wrote:

A flock of pigeons mimics the cupola of the Lingotto complex in Turin on the same day U.S. skater Johnny Weir's aura goes missing. From SFGate.com Weird, huh? Oh, and it's Turino, not Turin.

first...what? johnny weir's aura goes missing? is there a lost and found box for auras? perhaps my scarf i lost in undergrad is there too.

second...ive actually been really confused by the whole turino/turin thing. ive come to the very illogically based opinion that its both. im basing this illogic on the fact that news outlets have labeled the olympic city as both, and the news can't be wrong.

Drew · Gucci

Yeah, I didn't get the aura thing, but I thought it was funny the birds were mimicing that globe.

Trust me, I'm Italian: it's Turino ;P

Hermes

relrel wrote:

ive actually been really confused by the whole turino/turin thing. ive come to the very illogically based opinion that its both. im basing this illogic on the fact that news outlets have labeled the olympic city as both, and the news can't be wrong.

Torino is Italian,Turin is English, just like Roma and Firenze are Italian,and Rome and Florence are English.

atlgirl · Gucci

1. Johnny Weir's comment when he didn't skate well enough to earn a medal in the men's competition (was in second place going into the last program) was:

“I never felt comfortable in this building,” he said. “I didn’t feel my inner peace, I didn’t feel my aura. Inside I was black.”

2. Here is msn.com's take on the Turin / Torino issue:

Turin or Torino?

Turin or Torino? It’s the Olympic version of “You say tomato, I say tomahto.”

The city in northern Italy that’s hosting the Winter Olympics is Torino” to the locals and NBC. For most of us non-Italians, it’s always been Turin.

“I believe readers are seeing it on television with the NBC logo, it says ’Torino,’ the Olympic Games,” Ron Fritz, sports editor at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., said Tuesday. “And then they see it in the paper, ’Turin,’ and they’re thinking we got it wrong.”

The explanation for the different versions is simple.

Sort of.

“Turin is the English translation of the Italian word Torino,” said Clara Orban, a professor of Italian at DePaul University. “Standard practice in the United States is if a city name has been translated differently, go with the English translation.”
That’s what The Associated Press is doing. Its policy — and it was around long before Turin was awarded the Olympic Games — is to use the English version of foreign cities. It’s Rome, not Roma. Munich, not Muenchen. Moscow instead of Mockba or Moskva.

And Florence isn’t going to be called by its Italian name, Firenze. At least not without an accompanying map so people would know what city that is.

“We use Turin in accordance with our long-standing style to use English names on English-language wires,” said Terry Taylor, AP sports editor. “It’s the Shroud of Turin, for instance, not the Shroud of Torino. And when the World Cup comes to Germany this summer, we will write that games will be played in Munich, not Muenchen.

“Of course, in the interest of accuracy, we will not Anglicize the name in full references to the Olympic organizing committee, which uses Torino, and we will not change Torino to Turin in quotations.”

The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other news organizations follow similar policies. Travel writers at the Times, for example, have been calling cities by their English names for years.

“For us, it’s a pretty simple style rule,” said Tom Jolly, sports editor at the Times. “We follow Webster’s and The World Fact Book as our guide. Generally those are spelled in an Anglicized fashion.”

Even the Italians go with English translations sometimes. One of their top soccer teams is AC Milan, not AC Milano, and it’s supposedly because when the club was founded, the namers wanted to stick with the sport’s English roots.

So why the linguistic confusion?

The official name of the games is “Torino 2006,” and the International Olympic Committee refers to the city by its Italian name. When the games were awarded in June 1999, then-IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch announced, “The hosts of the 2006 Games will be Torino.”

After NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol took a trip to Turin, he decided the network would go with Torino, too. NBC has the U.S. broadcast rights to the games.
“Dick was hearing the way the locals were saying Torino, and how it’s so magnificently Italian how it rolls off the tongue,” said Mike McCarley, vice president of communications and marketing for NBC Sports.

He decided on that trip that we would call it Torino.”

And with as many as 200 million people tuning in to watch the games, that means there’ll be a lot of Americans speaking at least one word of Italian for a few weeks.

USA Today also went with Torino because that is the official name, said Monte Lorell, the paper’s managing editor for sports.

“We had to decide what is the least confusing to our readers. You could say the Torino Olympics in Turin, but that just leads to confusion,” Lorell said. “We decided to just make it uniform all the way throughout.

“I feel a little bit better that NBC is using Torino,” Lorell said, “because that’s what readers will be seeing on TV.”

So, Turin or Torino.

Either way, the Winter Olympics will simply call the city home next month.

“I think,” Jolly said, “people will be able to figure it out.”

Until they do, confusion is sure to be the rule.

“I had this woman call me up,” said David Ledford, executive editor at The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. “She said, ‘Don’t you even know how to spell it? It’s in huge type on the front page. On the front page!’ I didn’t get a chance to say anything, she hung up on me.”

That pic of the birds is cool!