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14 July 2025


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PARABÉNS vida !!!
GEFELICITEERD bonknhoot !! GRATULACJE WRmirekd !

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A strong fleet of 129 SOLers came to the start line (point) in racy re-tuned Version 2 IMOCA 60's for SOL's classic, almost annual, celebration of all things Turkish; 111 started and exactly eighty made it to the finish, through the constant coastal dangers of the Bosporus and Dardanelles and the straits and channels between the Greek islands and the Turkish mainland. It is the very special SOLer who can negotiate this voyage without stopping for at least one BBQ, and amongst the leaders none did, even our winner, vida, admitting to a scenic stop, if perhaps a brief one, so he reports under the button above. As runner-up bonknhoot has sailed some (by no means all) of these waters IRL, he thought to share his cruising blogs with you as well, which you will find under the buttons left and right of vida's report.

In his report, vida makes mention of the fact that at the request of the Turkish government, the UN in 2022 agreed that the country's name in English shall be The Republic of Türkiye. However, the UN has no jurisdiction about what people write or say, and so the US Department of State quickly advised as follows:

"the Board on Geographic Names retains both Turkey and Republic of Turkey, the previous spelling, as conventional names, as these are more widely understood by the American public. The department will use the spelling that you see today [Türkiye] in most of our formal diplomatic and bilateral contexts, including in public communications, but the conventional name can also be used if it is in furtherance of broader public understanding."

In short, as neither the 'ü' nor the ending 'iye' is a feature of the King's nor for that matter, American English, generally please ignore.

Allegedly, the background to the Turkish request could be the misfortune that that great American bird - no, not the eagle - goes by the same name. Turns out though that it is the bird rather than the country that got misnamed and by the Pilgrims when they first encountered it in the New World, as the birds looked a bit - not a lot - like a Guinea fowl, which in turn in England at the time were known as turkey hens and cocks since they were thought to come from Turkey, the land of the Turcs, although the Spanish and French settlers knew both the American bird and the African bird as Indian hens, either because they thought America was India or because the African birds used to come in on ships returning from India!

But turkeys were a bit stupid and easy to catch and kill, hence a pejorative association developed. Better then might have been if Turkey had asked to change the English name for the bird, for example by borrowing dinde ('of India') from the French or kalkoen (Dutch bastardisation of Calica). 'Dim as a dinde' has a ring about it and over time should catch on, the more so as it's grammatically and logically hard for anybody to be a turkey if Turkey is only and exclusively a nation state of 85m people.

Humour - appeals to a sense of the ludicrous and absurd (Merriam-Webster) - will out!

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