Miss Nomer

Big companies spend vast amounts of money to come up with a name for themselves or for their products. They have learned from companies like Mitsubishi, which created the Pajero car without realizing that in Spanish slang, the word means 'wanker'.

Small companies, however, don't have the resources to do this kind of research. And when small companies are subsequently bought by bigger companies, hilarity ensues. Case in point: newly-acquired photo thingy "flickr" sounds, well, 'fabulous' in my native Dutch, in which it is a common pejorative for 'homosexual'. Spelled flikker in that language, it is also used in constructions such as flikker op (go fuck yourself) and geen ene flikker (not a fucking thing).

To imagine what this feels like to a Dutch person, take the next weblog entry about flickr that you come across (and there's sure to be many) and in your head, replace every instance of "flickr" with "faggot".