December 1, 2003
@ 11:31 AM

From the BBC

Red-faced officials at General Motors in Canada have been forced to think of a new name for their latest model after discovering it was a slang word for masturbation.

GM officials said they had been unaware that LaCrosse was a term for self-gratification among teenagers in French-speaking Quebec.

The article describes a copuple of similar issues with product names as they cross the language barrier. The most amusing story was the poor reception of the Ford Pinto in Brazil which was attributed to the fact that in Brazilian Portuguese slang, pinto means "small penis".


 

Monday, December 1, 2003 12:37:28 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I hate to lower the tone even further, but MSN did take several years to change one of their Hotmail query string keys from 'cumbox' to 'curmbox'!
Tuesday, December 2, 2003 11:27:21 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
There's a town called LaCrosse from my home state of Wisconsin.

Hmmmm...
Comments are closed.