When I first saw this article quoted at Code Red Women for the Troops, I thought that it was a case of the further coarsening of our society but after I read the article I realized that it was just incompetence on the part of the marketing people at Volkswagen (you really should look into how a word is perceived in your target audience before you use it). Don't they have any Hispanics at Volkswagen?
Volkswagen said Friday it will remove billboards in New York, Los Angeles and Miami after receiving complaints that a word used in an advertisement was offensive to Hispanics.
The ad for the new GTI 2006 had a photo of the sports car accompanied by the words "Turbo-Cojones." Cojones, which means testicles in Spanish, has become a casually used term for boldness or guts in English but has never lost its more vulgar connotations in its native language.
A billboard in the Miami neighborhood of Little Havana generated complaints, and the company decided to remove it Wednesday, said Steve Keyes, a Volkswagen spokesman. Volkswagen AG has received no complaints for its billboards in New York and Los Angeles but decided to pull them anyway.
