Turbo-Cojones

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:01 AM -0500 3/18/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060317/ap_on_bi_ge/volkswagen_billboard_1
>
>Volkswagen to Remove Offensive Billboards
>
>MIAMI - Volkswagen said Friday it will remove billboards in New York,
>Los Angeles and Miami after receiving complaints that a word used in
>an advertisement was offensive to Hispanics.
>
>The ad for the new GTI 2006 had a photo of the sports car accompanied
>by the words "Turbo-Cojones." Cojones, which means testicles in
>Spanish, has become a casually used term for boldness or guts in
>English but has never lost its more vulgar connotations in its native
>language.
>
>A billboard in the Miami neighborhood of Little Havana generated
>complaints, and the company decided to remove it Wednesday, said Steve
>Keyes, a Volkswagen spokesman. Volkswagen AG has received no
>complaints for its billboards in New York and Los Angeles but decided
>to pull them anyway.
>
>Ana Roca, a professor of Spanish and linguistics at Florida
>International University, said the English usage of the word "doesn't
>have the same power it has in Spanish."
>
>"People who are reading it in a Spanish neighborhood, it will have a
>different effect for them ... because they realize the real
>connotation," Roca said.
>
>Keyes said the original billboard was not intended to offend anyone.
>Instead, it was an attempt to convey that the GTI is a
>"high-performance sports car," he said.
>
>The billboards will be replaced with two ads, with one saying "Here
>today, gone tamale" and the other "Kick a little gracias."

...which will clearly not offend any Spanish speakers.  Amazing.

LH

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