In this episode, Martha and Grant discuss advertising slogans and product names supposedly botched in translation. They also recommend an eclectic mix of books for the word-lover on your holiday list, from military slang to Yiddish.

Listen to this episode.

Biting the Wax Tadpole? It’s the wacky title of a new book by language enthusiast Elizabeth Little which has Martha and Grant talking about whether Coca-Cola and Chevy ran into cultural translation problems when selling products abroad. Did the Chevy Nova really sell poorly in Latin America because “No va” means “don’t go” in Spanish? You can find more information about it in Dave Wilton’s book Word Myths.

A caller wants help understanding a phrase he saw in Sports Illustrated: enough money to burn a wet dog.

Other callers have weird words on their minds, including biffy (meaning “toilet”) and gedunk (meaning “ice cream” or “a snack bar” where you might buy sweets).

Greg Pliska has a quiz about chemical names that should exist but don’t.

A caller asks about how lakes get named and we talk about a lake with a 45-letter Indian name that may or may not translate as, “You fish on your side, I fish on my side and nobody fishes in the middle.” It’s Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. if you want to know how to pronounce that, here’s the helpful song Martha mentions on the show. It was written by Stephen Willey of the band Shades of Grey.

A caller from Indiana wonders if the T9 text-messaging function has led to the term book being a new term for “cool.”

This week’s slang contestant learns about the slang terms bluebird and corpsing.

A New York caller is incensed by the verb incent and a California listener is puzzled when his Southern relatives observe that his new baby is fixing to tune up whenever she’s about to start crying.

Grant and Martha recommend books for the word lover on your holiday shopping list:

Grant’s picks:

Fubar: Soldier Slang of World War II by Gordon L. Rottman

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin by Nicholas Ostler

Martha’s Picks:

Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion by Michael Wex

The Dord, The Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words by Anu Garg

Read the original blog post and listen to this episode.

As I understand the translation of Chinese for Coca Cola — it loosely means delicious happiness. (One of the words for delicious in Mandarin is: kekou — the first word, Coca) Quite amazing for something so American to be able to have a phonetic translation into Chinese that actually means something — AND something that relates to the product as well — not an easy feat in Chinese!

Its known as idea reinforcement, John, to use a series of similar but not perfectly synonymous adjectives to emphasize a point. It’s quite common in spoken language, such as in story-telling and unscripted, off-the-cuff talk on the radio.

Steve, it’s possible, but I cannot verify that BFI was in the portable toilet business before 1942, when the word “biffy” seems to have first appeared in print, and it also doesn’t gibe with the term being most well-known in Wisconsin.

I completely agree with the caller who was incensed about “incent.” And I cringe at the sound of “incentivize,” too.

Argh!

(Had trouble with that link, but found it [I think] here. They said it much better than I could: “Who could possibly have concocted this ghastly word, and what was their wicked design?”)

Thanks for this observation, Andrew. I think I’ve heard that, too.

Regarding the book/cool transmorgification (thank you, Calvin), I came across something similar recently. When posting a comment for an internet video of a skate boarder doing a face plant, one might exclaim “Owned!” If that’s not bad enough, an apparent misspelling of Owned has become popular. With the letter O being so close to P on most keyboards, people occasionaly respond “Pwned!” And it has not become intentional.

I think seeing this spelling and usage is more painful than the face plant. I’ve used computers and the internet since the dawn of personal computers, and I have no patience for these internet word entities. While I may sometimes laugh out loud, I will never lol.

By the way, the math required to post this message asks me what is the sum of 3 + 1. Shouldn’t that be what is the sum of 3 AND 1?

I laughed when I heard the word biffy. In the late forties, anyone who attended Camp Wathana (near Detroit, Michigan) would recognize that word. One of the first thing campers learned was that the facilities were called the biffy. I thought that was a term made up by the camp director.

Maybe, Geoff, except that the expression is also sometimes rendered as “enough money to burn a wet mule.” Is there also a part of a fireplace called a “mule”?

I loved the Biffy discussion. Though I think the usage has spread beyond what you mentioned, Grant. Growing up in Southern California I would run into this word every now and then. I wouldn’t say it was the most popular word for what is usually called a PortaPotty, but I think it’s generally understood.

- G

Predictive texting often leads to… textonyms. Now there’s a lovely word for you. (Google hits: 892.)

martha said:

Paradox: Ick! Sounds like a variation on “no room to swing a cat,” eh?

Martha:

I find a few references on the web that suggest that “swinging a dead cat” arose as a variation of “swinging a cat” (which actually refers to a cat-o-nine-tails) but nothing that looks definate or well documented.

On the other hand, one (that being the dead variety) is used to express that
something is very common while the other (which one may just as well assume is “un-dead”?) expresses that space is very tight.

Some sites suggest that the “dead” version grew out of a series of jokes about dead cats that were popular in the 1970’s. This would be, as it were, a lone surviving dead cat! Seems to me though, having gone through my teens in the 70’s, that dead baby jokes were the rage, not dead cats. Perhaps I just missed out.