Turbo-Cojones

[Jonathan Lighter]

A few years back a friend of mine sent me a store-bought thank-you card that showed a cartoon of green stuff growing out of male buttocks.

  The sentiment was

                                    Muchas Grassy Ass !

  (Or maybe it was "Much Ass Grassy Ass !")

  Should I have been offended ? Are you ?  What if I were a native speaker of Spanish ?  Does the designer of the card have issues ?  Does my friend have issues ? Do I ? What if they'd been female buttocks ?

  Nearly a thousand Googlits for  "Muchas/ Much Ass Grassy Ass."

  JL


Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: Turbo-Cojones
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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



---------------------------------
 Yahoo! Mail
 Use Photomail to share photos without annoying attachments.

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