Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ubc-cs!manis From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Internationalization anecdotes wanted Message-ID: <9068@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: 7 Aug 90 19:52:41 GMT References: <1065@limbo.Intuitive.Com> Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca Organization: Institute for Pure and Applied Eschatology Lines: 28 1) In the early '70's, an organization called the Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games was formed in Canada, to be responsible for the '76 Montreal Olympics. The organization was named COJO (Comite' Organisatif des Jeux Olympiques), which lasted until a letter from COJO arrived at an office in Buenos Aires. In Argentina, at least, COJO (pronounced like the salmon) means `fuck'. They promptly changed their name to Comite' des Jeux Olympiques. 2) I was recently told that IBM has discontinued the RISCStation/6000 designation for their RIOS machines. In Australia, `RS' means what `BS' means here. [This one isn't an internationalization one, but...] 3) When HP brought out its first pocket calculator, the HP-35, they touted its much easier to use `Reverse Polish Notation'. (The Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz wrote about prefix and postfix notations circa 1950; they were often called `Lukasiewicz notation' (forward and reverse), but people who were non-Polish found this hard to pronounce, so people said `prefix Polish' and `postfix Polish' instead. Apparently, HP got complaints about the `ethnic slur', so modern HP literature uses `RPN' without ever explaining what it means (`rotated paronomastic Naugahyde'?). -- \ Vincent Manis "There is no law that vulgarity and \ Department of Computer Science literary excellence cannot coexist." /\ University of British Columbia -- A. Trevor Hodge / \ Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 (604) 228-2394