Turbo-Cojones

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Sat Mar 18 05:01:25 UTC 2006


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."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list