It riles me that they all abbreviate "Rio de Janeiro" to "Rio". That's like abbreviating "New York" to "New" or "Sao Paolo" to "Sao". "Rio" is the least important part of the name!
As we all well know, "Rio" is the Portuguese/Spanish word for "River" (see also Rio Grande, Rio Tinto etc). Behindthename further informs us:
Its full name is Rio de Janeiro, which means "river of January", so named because the first explorers came to the harbor in January and mistakenly thought it was a river mouth.
Look on a map - Rio de Janeiro does not have a prominent river running through it (like London or Rome), so that makes abbreviating the name to Rio even more annoying.
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I couldn't avoid catching a few seconds of live coverage of something or other recently, the commentator solemnly announced that the competitor's time was "... seconds faster than the world record"
Bollocks. His or her time was precisely 0.0 seconds faster than the world record because be definition it is the world record.
Debate Magazine
