I had a great conversation with Mariano, one of my clients out in California. I had never gotten a chance to speak with him much before, but when I returned his call about an email problem the first thing he asked if I was related to “Big-head” (I forget the Spanish word he used) Sivori, Enrique Omar Sivori, one of Argentina’s most famous soccer players, named by Pelé as one of the ” top 125 greatest footballers”. He pronounced Sivori as “sivery”, which seems to be the usual Italian pronunciation despite the fact that my family has always pronounced it as “sivoori”, which I think is the proper Klingon pronunciation. He gave me the whole run down on Argentine soccer and how there are so many Italians in Argentina that it is more like Italy than Italy is, especially the north of the boot, which he said has become very commercialized and fast-paced like America. All the talk of soccer and Italy made me want to buy a Juventus replica jersey.
Another bit I learned while researching: “oriundi” is a word meaning South Americans of Italian stock. I created a wikipedia account just to make a minor edit to the sparse english language version of the Omar Sivori article, and to add a stub for a definition of “oriundi”. Watch out Internet!