It's not the most colloquial Spanish term, but dictionaries suggest that Nokia's new phone name has money-for-pleasure connotations. It's always exciting when a new product emerges and someone happens to notice that, somewhere across the world, its name means "enema. My breath, therefore, went on hiatus when I read this morning that Nokia's fine new smartphone, the Lumia , translates into Spanish as "prostitute.
It was MSNBC that offered this revelation , coupled with a suggestion that surely someone at Nokia should have checked this. It quoted the Real Academia Espanola , one of the repositories of everything that is pure in the Spanish tongue. There, indeed, was a direct translation of "lumia" as "prostituta. This suggested that "lumia" has gypsy roots and that, therefore, the word tends only to occur in places that have a deep gypsy background.
I performed my own little research. I asked five Spanish speakers whether they had heard of the word. For each, it was a first. This is not statistically significant. It does, however, suggest that this word might not be as colloquially current as, say, "Siri"--meaning "buttocks"-- is in Japanese.
So, while some of you contemplate this peculiar happenstance, might I ask you to consider the word "puttock"? This was a medieval English word for prostitute. Might I also offer you "dollymop"? This was, apparently, the colloquial Victorian word for "prostitute. For another was "tail. And then there's the word "punk. However, in Elizabethan times it meant, well, "prostitute.
Perhaps "lumia" has more of a known connotation than my research thus far suggests. But we should surely only worry if the next fine Nokia smartphone was called the Nokia Puttock Be respectful, keep it civil and stay on topic.
