Turbo-Cojones

[Dennis R. Preston]

I'm taking bets it was the journalist and not Ana Roca who said "the
real connotation." The line between deno and conno may not always be
clear, but it seems pretty straightforward here:

deno = testicles
conno = courage, chutzpah, etc...

dInIs


>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

--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of English
15-C Morrill Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1036
Phone: (517) 353-4736
Fax: (517) 353-3755
preston at msu.edu

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