WHEN I was six years old, my hero was the world champion Brazilian Formula 1 driver, Emerson Fittipaldi. I had a picture of him on the wall beside my bed; I had various models and toys of his car; I thought I knew everything there was to know about him. But now that I'm somewhat older and living just up the road from Emerson (figuratively, if not quite literally) I realise there was one important thing I didn't know about him—how to pronounce his surname correctly.

Like most people in Britain I knew him as Fitty-poldy which was, after all, what he was called (and still is) on the TV. But this is a lazy, anglicised way of saying the name. While in its country of origin, Italy, it would be pronounced just as it's spelled, here in Brazil it is Fitchy-powdjy. While in Brazil, I'll call him Emerson just like everyone else here does, but once I move back to England I'm going to be faced with a dilemma. Calling him Emerson would sound like I knew him, but Fitchy-powdjy is going to seem pretentious and I can pretty much guarantee that no one else is going to join me in it. So I'll almost certainly end up going back to Fitty-poldy for convenience. After all, it's not like he comes up in casual conversation all that often.

This is not the first time I've had this problem. A long time ago I lived in Finland for two years and ever since then I've found myself unable to say the word sauna as saw-nah—to rhyme with fauna. (I was going to say to “rhyme with corner” there, but my lovely Irish wife has helpfully pointed out that only lazy English people pronounce the word corner without the r's like that.)

In Finnish, where every syllable is pronounced separately, the word should correctly be said as three syllables, sa-oo-na, although even dedicated adherents to the Finnish pronunciation tend to shorten this to sow-na. Sadly, when I use this version back in England I'm most usually greeted with a wry smile and corrected with polite condescension. And sauna is a word which crops up a lot more frequently than Fittipaldi.

There are several reasons why I stick with sow-na: solidarity with the poor Finns who have had their one contribution to the international lexicon callously mispronounced being one of them, paternally-inherited stubbornness being another. But the main one is probably just habit. I had a lot of saunas in Finland. I used the word most days. It stuck.

I don't know what the right answer is. Languages import foreign words and names all the time, and it's hit or miss whether or not they're pronounced the original way. I spend my time inadvertently pronouncing words in a way that would have native speakers grimacing, but unless I have a strong personal connection to the word it doesn't bother me because I'm not generally talking to native speakers at the time.

So I now live in Som Pow-loo and not Sow Pow-low (and even this is an anglicisation as to say the São properly requires a fair bit more nose than I can give it), Djwan (not Huan) Miro is one of my favourite artists, I have sow-nas instead of saw-nas and (at least as far as I'm concerned) Emerson Fitchy-Powdjy is still the greatest Brazilian racing driver of all time.

And when I bump into him in the supermarket, I intend to tell him so.