“Lacrosse” is an English word, referring to the sport… which is also known in French as “crosse”, probably by analogy with a bishop’s stick. (English speakers really like to put the French articles in front of French words.) So yes, there is a potential for sneering and it probably would have been unwise to use this name in Quebec. But “Buick Lacrosse” is also in itself a hideously ugly name.
Why? To make “tabernacle” a swear word, you really have to pronounce it “tabarnak” so there really isn’t a high risk of confusion. It’s also all in the context. You can talk about the “calice” of a flower and I won’t blink an eye, it’s not as if those words were naughty by themselves. I don’t think twice about “Mormon Tabernacle Choir”.
Bite/byte in French means dick (male tackle). The IT term, being a loanword/neologism is masculine, and the French word is feminine (from ‘bite d’amarrage’) but you usually need context to differentiate.
So ‘megabytes’ and such used to get a few chuckles, and a “real” French word ‘octet’ is sometimes used instead, but interestingly, everybody got used to it, and you don’t even hear the secondary meaning anymore.
There are also a couple of names that don’t travel too well - Connery (connerie) means something like ‘fuckup’ - “t’as encore fait une grosse connerie”, Maccabee (and McCabe) is a slang word for ‘dead body’. French speakers generally adopt the English stress patterns to avoid the ambiguity.
That would probably work for ‘pot’ though, right ?
“Pick” (spelled pikk) is a vulgar word for penis in Norwegian. Caught is almost identical to horny (kåt). And if you borrow the adjective ‘fit’ into Norwegian, as some do, and pluralize it, as one does in this language, you get the Norwegian equivalent of cnt. There’s a clip somewhere of a sports reporter who not only does that, but, as one does sometimes when speaking, pauses and repeats the word: There are some really fit - - fit people out on the court today, or as is an equally, or possibly more accurate translation of what the average Norwegian hears: There are some really cnt - - c*nt people out on the court today
This gets used a lot for humorous effect in commercials around here.
In any case, it makes “The Three Little Pigs” impossible to read for kids’ English classes.
My friend Gary discovered that his name isn’t exactly rude in Japanese, but it can be rather embarrassing at times. 下痢 (geri)= diarrhea.
Well, I’m sure they had the correct tone for your name.
Never mind dirty-sounding English words. You have to be careful about the Thai words that sound close to naughty stuff. “Khawy” (sounds like the English “coy”) is the verb “to wait”; but “khuay” (“khoo-ai”) mans “dick.” Lots of other examples, too, of polite Thai words that sound like dirty words. A favorite pastime of Thais is to make you say the dirty Thai word while you think you’re saying the polite Thai word. I’ve seen entire offices crack up in tears because I inadvertenly said something nasty out of context. Yuk yuk.
I heard a story about a Welshman named Clive Owen Jones who was detained by customs when he arrived in Mexico - they were upset by **COJONES **stamped on his suitcase.
‘Bus’ in Norway means ‘tit’, as I recall, so a bus to the airport was an interesting notion.
I had a friend who was sent to Scotland on a military detail years ago. The first barmaid he spoke to slapped him silly when he introduced himself: “Hi, I’m Randy.”
The Wikipedia article says the originally intended name was Vixen which does in fact sound like the main colloguial German term for ‘to masturbate’.
BTW I also recall an 80’s, very marginally naughty PC game named Vixen, that was marked as She Fox in Germany because of the similarity.
The other statement in the Wikipedia article (the VIC-20 was also changed to VC-20 for the German market for that reason) I’d take leave to doubt. The German pronounciation of VIC is so dissimilar to that of fick that not even adolescents would usually connect the words. I consider it more probable that VIC was eschewed for the German market because of its similarity to Wick, a maker of OTC products against symptoms of the cold.
I was in Jr. High when the big influx of Iranians escaped over here. The boxer Gary Cooney was famous then and it cracked them up. Cooney is Farsi for asshole.
I believe “mooni/mooney” is the same in Greek. No end of fun with all the Aboriginal Australian placenames: Mooney Ponds, Mooney Mooney, etc. And we have a big Greek population here.
Same with Cantonese, and the bad thing is it’s one of the most common phrasebook words: “Yes”. Said with the wrong intonation, and “hai” becomes “cunt”.
That’s so interesting! I’ve heard “chin-chin” said with toasts at anglophone, francophone, and mixed gatherings. It could be the influence of the Italian community in Montreal, but I think it’s just an onomatapoea.
