Never has the name of an Olympic city stirred such confusion.
Pyeongchang, South Korea, the city hosting the 2018 Winter Olympics, was thrilled when it was awarded the Games back in 2011. But it soon realized it had a problem.
People were confusing the name of the town with North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang. (Pyeongchang lies just 50 miles from South Korea’s heavily militarized border with the North.)
And officials knew they had to do something when, in 2014, a Kenyan man headed to Pyeongchang for a UN conference ended up in Pyongyang instead.
“By the time we were getting off the plane,” the man told the Wall Street Journal at the time, “I had an eerie feeling that this was not Seoul.”
No kidding.
So since being awarded the Games, Pyeongchang changed its name, by capitalizing the “C.” A lot of media organizations ignore this — mostly because the Associated Press stylebook tells them to, although CNN uses the capital C when referring to the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, not the town.
But there haven’t been any more reports of folks flying to one of the most repressive regimes on earth when they meant to go to South Korea either, so there’s that.
