(Chevy) Nova --Query

[Michael McKernan]

Larry Horn wrote:

>Well, "nueva", but there are number of more high-register (scholarly,
>literary, scientific) doublets involving "nova-" in which the
>diphthongization didn't apply, e.g. "novela".  I think the first
>association for a Spanish speaker with "Nova", with that stress
>pattern (a point Snopes mentions), would be 'new' and not 'doesn't
>go'.

Surely any Spanish-speaker found the Chevy No-Va a great joke.  Couldn't
miss it.  Hurt sales? Probably not.  However, local competing dealers would
have been likely to use "Nova no va" as a marketing jingle/slogan whenever
they had a chance.  Since there was not the type of mass-market for cars in
Latin America (or Spain, I suppose) in the days of the Nova that there was
in the USA, it seems very unlikely to me that there would have been mass
media advertising by major competitors, using such a slogan.

But there might have been, since such anti-slogans were promoted in other
cases.  When I lived in Ecuador, for instance, a locally made instant
coffee brand competed against the international brand Nescafe (in this
case, produced in neighboring Columbia).  The Ecuadorian company, for
rather obvious reasons, named their product 'Sicafe,' and blanketed the
country with radio and print advertising claiming that 'Nescafe no es cafe,
pero Sicafe, ah..' (Nescafe is not coffee, but Sicafe, ah...).  I never
knew whether this campaign brought Sicafe any success. Most Ecuadorians
abhorred instant coffee (as well as standard 'brewed' coffee) and preferred
instead to make their coffee using a powerful coffee extract (called
'tinto'), which was an impenetrably dark, thick liquid added in small
quantity to hot milk or hot water.  A small bottle of tinto sat on every
restaurant table (and in most homes, I suppose).  Occasionally, clue-less
tourists tried to drink the tinto straight, with dire consequences.

Back to Novas:  a vaguely similar situation arose for the US Government
when it created a new foreign affairs agency called the United States
Information Agency (USIA).  When USIA was begun, it replaced the prior
United States Information Service (USIS), but in many foreign countries, it
kept the USIS name and acronym in an attempt to separate its very public
diplomacy from the covert intentions and actions of the CIA. This practice
of name-switching had no particular connection to Spanish (whose speakers
would translate and form initials differently, anyway), but throughout
Latin America, USIA called itself USIS.  Nowadays, USIA/USIS is no more,
having been completely absorbed by the Department of State. (Only English
speakers would notice how much U-SIS sounds like 'useless', something this
very active agency was not, despite some jokes aimed at it.)


Michael McKernan