THE OLYMPIC ROLL CALL

Truth be told, I actually did not start this article because I wanted to write an article.

I was just curious.

You know how it is when you stumble upon a thing; maybe it’s an event, a word, a place that you know absolutely nothing about. You get that itch to investigate the said thing and before you know it, you are busy leafing through books and dictionaries trying to conquer the dilemma. In this case it was the Olympics.
As I watched Mr. Bean astound us with his hilarious construction of music and comedy, it suddenly dawned on me that I was a complete novice as regards the Olympics.

I suddenly realized that I knew next to nothing about it. Wait! I know now that I mentioned it, a few of you will want to regale us with all the history of the games (most probably inaccurate) that you have acquired in recent times but that’s not where I am headed.

My interest is simply in the names. By names, I mean the unique factor that gives every geographical enclave its identity. What the particular country is called. I really didn’t know that the Olympics encouraged a vast display of countries with names that would otherwise never have seen the light of day.
Ok, some of you are already grinning because you now know where I am headed abi? Cool.
I saw and heard many strange names in this year’s Olympics march-past at the prestigious stadium in London that my brain was threatening to overheat.
See me, see country name sha!

In my unscientific analysis, a few countries were named using a cooking theme, for example Cook islands, Turkmenistan, Malta while others sounded like they had run out of vowels; Leichtenstein, Krygastan, Kiribati and Uzbekistan

Some countries however, sounded like they were named by a complete idiot- Palau, Oman, Suriname, Seychelles and my personal favorites were the ones that were structured like goofy sentences e.g. Federated state of Micronesia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saotome and principe and Lao’s people democratic republic.

My question is simple. Who gets the contract to name a country? And do the citizens get to vote on the name chosen or are they just forced to accept it regardless of how it sounds? (In some cases, how it looks).

Because I profoundly sympathize with the poor citizens who are forced to accept weird and wacky country names like Timor leste, Tuvalu and Tonga!

Up Nigeria!

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