Global Lingo Thread

[Bruno]

lopen.

Wandelen != lopen
If we say lopen, we mean running, or walking fast..

[sidneykidney]

I'm afraid Sir Sidney and I were quite naughty in a side chat on the record breaking evening, when it was all kicking off over the censor filter, we found quite a few that didn't get editied.

Take my name in vain without telling me? Tut tut Silver. Now i'll have to keep an eye on this thread....

Yesterday I was in Glasgow and was showing a french friend who is visiting us around PrincesSquare shopping arcade. Its a VERY posh, VERY high class indoor shopping centre. All the designer labels... you get the idea.

Anyway when we came to a shop called 'zizzi' she fell about laughing. It took some minutes for her to catch her breath and explain that 'zizi' is what a small boy might call his ***** (such as pee-pee, willy, etc).

Edit: I just discovered that the word 'travesty' (English) is pronounced the same as the word 'travesti' (French) and the two mean VERY different things.

[Nord Jim]

Take my name in vain without telling me? Tut tut Silver. Now i'll have to keep an eye on this thread....

Yesterday I was in Glasgow and was showing a french friend who is visiting us around PrincesSquare shopping arcade. Its a VERY posh, VERY high class indoor shopping centre. All the designer labels... you get the idea.

Anyway when we came to a shop called 'zizzi' she fell about laughing. It took some minutes for her to catch her breath and explain that 'zizi' is what a small boy might call his ***** (such as pee-pee, willy, etc).

Edit: I just discovered that the word 'travesty' (English) is pronounced the same as the word 'travesti' (French) and the two mean VERY different things.

Reminds me of a automobile transmission shop I once saw out on Long Island in New York. The name of the shop was "Tranny Man."

I'm told he might have had a marketing problem in the UK.

Of course, in the states we have some famous examples of marketing goofs for international sales. The most famous was the Chevrolet Nova. How are you going to sell a car in Latin America whose name means "Doesn't go?"

My favorite, though, is Japanese products. At times, the names they come up with seem to come out of nowhere. A number of years ago, in the wake of the introduction of Gore-Tex, Japanese companies were lining up with competitive fabric treatments. (This was in my outdoor writer days.) The most successful at the time was called Entrant. That's not so bad (although I never did figure out where they came up with it). There was another that was silicone-based, as opposed to the usual PTFE. It was called, naturally enough, Sillitex. Another was called 'Dinkum." When I asked the sales rep where they'd come up with that one, he said, "Don't talk so loud. The first suggestion was 'Rectum.'"

I love this thread.

j

[Chimensch]

I used to sell computers and software to furniture dealers and I had my office at one of my customers. We used to play Trivial Pursuits in the evening and I had a reputation. One day one of the salesmen comes to me because he and his wife liked to play Scrabble and his wife had bought some Scrabble dictionaries and had called him with some fun new words. There was one word that he couldn't remember, but he remembered the definition and he thought, given my Trivial talents, that I could tell him what the word was. The definition was to masturbate by rubbing up against another person. Well, I have never met a word I didn't like and, about ten years before, I had read an article in Time magazine about perverts in the Paris Metrò, so I said, "The pervert is a frotteur and the act itself is frottage". Well, people began to argue with me and pull out dictionaries, but this wasn't a word that you would find in the type of dictionary you would find in an office. We ended up calling the Chicago Public Library, which had a hotline number for answers to just this type of question. So, I called and asked for the definition of "frottage". The young woman came back in a few minutes and said, "There are four definitions ... the first is a bandage that you put over skin that is itching. The second is a type of artwork made by rubbing, such as taking a rubbing of a gravestone. The third is a technique of writing music where you write the notes directly to paper without playing them and the fourth is the masturbate by rubbing up against another person." Okay, I thought that this was the end of the story but about three weeks later Herman Miller (a big office furniture company) called all the salesreps to the showroom to introduce a new line of fabrics made from raw silk called ... Frottage! The salesreps from my customer began to laugh and one asked, "Do you know what that means?" The reply was, well, it does have that meaning, but no one will know." "Well, I'm a dumb furniture salesman from Chicago and I know what it means!" Six months later, Herman Miller changed the name.

[bpave777]

Years ago in Norway I was talking to my cousin about the giant moose I saw while hiking that day. I used a hand gesture to describe the size and he started laughing. He thought I was talking about a mouse. The Norwegian word for mouse is mus. The word for moose is elk (maybe Bjorn or The Pastor can give us the correct spelling).

[LX_Emergency]

And there's always Dell computers....the word "Del" (pronounced the same way as Dell in Dutch) means tramp or slut.


Therefore a lot of people buy slut computers.

[Chimensch]

In the early 1990s (to the best of my recollection), Nike ran a TV commercial that only lasted a couple of days. It featured hundreds of African tribesmen with spears running across the Savannah wearing Nikes. One of the tribesmen stops in front of the camera and says something in Swahili. It was translated in a subtitle as "Just do it". Well, some professor of Swahili called the newspaper (the New York Times, I think) and said, "What he's really saying is, ‘These are too tight, can I have another pair?’” Nike was embarrassed and asked the ad agency if they knew what he was saying and, if so, why did they do it, and the answer was, “we thought no one would understand Swahili.”