Did the founder/founders of MENSA realise that the acronym of the club they created meant ‘really, really stupid’ in Latin America?
Mensa isn’t an acronym; it’s the Latin word for table. And as I understand it, the usage of the word you refer to is not standard Spanish but rather is more or less ghetto slang.
And not the whole of Latin America at that.
And did the people that founded Bimbo bakeries know that “bimbo” is a mujer mensa here in the United States? See, it doesn’t really matter even if it were the case.
And did the people who gave themselves the title Oral Sex surgical appliances…
I’m dreadfully sorry I’ll get my coat…
In Spanish-speaking countries, Mensa is called Mesa, to continue the table analogy.
Can you buy those at Sofa King?
Wee Todd did.
ok ok ok ok ok. so mensa isn’t an acronym.
I wouldn’t say that menso/a is ghetto slang though. At most it’s informal. And it’s in use from Mexico to Chile (which is a pretty big range). AND it’s been in use since at least El Chavo del Ocho in the seventies (“no seathh menthoooo!”). I would hesitate to translate it, since it’s ususally not possible to be exact, but the closest i can find is “dumb”.
And as i understand it, from living here in Chile, the MENSA club is known as MENSA in all of latin america, if not the entire spanish world (e.g. www.mensa.com.ar , www.mensa.cl , etc.)
Now, bakeries aside (and that’s another funny one when you see a mexican football player with “bimbo” written on his chest), MENSA is a club of clever people. To prove your cleverness, wouldn’t you investigate your name for double entendres in other languages? Isn’t that the kind of playing-with-words fun that many MENSA members enjoy?
Let me rephrase the question.
Was the word “menso/a” in common use before the club started (in 1946 right?)?
Perhaps they did. Perhaps they enjoyed the irony. Smart people like irony.
(Or so I’ve heard.)
Mensa was founded at least 30 years prior to that, and I find no evidence that the founders knew Spanish, formally or informally. They probably were not familiar with Spanish slang, especially Latin American Spanish slang, if, indeed, this particular word was used as slang at the time Mensa was founded.
Spanish speakers know Latin too if they want to (it’s even easier for them since Spanish is still so closely entwined in its Latin roots). So they know that Mensa means Table in Latin. They know their word “mesa” for table has its roots in this Latin word. I’m not sure how the word came into semi-popular use to mean stupid. Ive asked 3 friends, one a Spanish fluent American, one a Mexican and one from Spain. Each of them is aware of the word, but says they hadn’t heard it in years and never use it themselves, they know it means “stupid” and yet have no idea what the implication is… is it calling someone a “table”? e.g. “stupid as a table” makes as much sense as “dumb as a post” … but alas none of them have any idea. As far as they know there is no clever association with anything related to tables or elitist intellectual clubs, it isn’t a pun or a play on words, it’s just a combination of letters that people have come to use. You don’t hear mensa used in this manner often in Mexico, but everyone pretty much understands what you mean if you say it. Try searching google in Spanish for “mensa” and for, let’s say “tonto”, another more common word for dumb or silly, and you will see that tonto is used in common Spanish about 10,000 to 1 over mensa. Now the big question is: Did the founders of the TV the series The Lone Ranger realize that in Spanish his faithful sidekick Tonto’s name means stupid as a mensa?
Menso is not so much “really, really stupid,” as silly, as in, “How silly of me!”
And they are silly, because they formed a club based solely on IQ tests. I don’t care what your IQ is if you’re an unbearable bore.
According to the RAE, it means the same as “tonto”, and it is an accepted coloquiallism in the areas of Mexico and Central America, primarily.
And like someone else mentioned, even if they were from a part that didn’t speak it, thanks to the wonderful Chavo del Ocho, many people in Latin America knows what it means.