We all know how frighteningly efficient the Germans are at everything they do, so I am assuming this is just a little Euro yoke, sorry, joke. Here, courtesy of those very naughty hoodlums over at 'IHTM' is a picture of the very latest Audi car unveiled at the Frankfurt motor show:
This was a very important occasion for the senior, er, management at Audi so there was considerable consternation when the sheet covering the car was slowly drawn back and the announcer presented "The new Audi e-Tron" - and after a short pause all the French correspondents fell about on the floor howling with laughter, some of them wondering how on earth the Germans beat them in 1940.
You see, there is a French word étron and - please, no giggling! - in English that means shit!
Now I did ask you all not to laugh.
Honestly, how are we ever going to build up European unity if you behave like that?
Pull yourselves together!
"étron m. (plural étrons)
1.turd, crap, fecal matter"
Firms used to spend cash just to avoid that sort of thing - that's why you end up with company names like Exxon, so that they don't mean anything offensive in any major language. (Though some wag will claim they mean dogturd in Maltese.)
Posted by: dearieme | Sunday, 19 September 2010 at 14:39
Funnily enough, a lot of people, customers mostly, used to refer to my bits of second-hand 'shrapnel' as a load of old 'étron' - never knew what they meant at the time!
Posted by: David Duff | Sunday, 19 September 2010 at 15:36