Melena, it's possible the problem was with Yahoo. I don't use Yahoo as a browser or as my home page (I run Safari on a nearly antiquated G4 iMac), but I have a Yahoo Mail account. For the past three or four days, Yahoo will work for a few minutes, then freeze my computer without warning. Fortunately, I can go back to the Finder on the iMac and "Force Quit" my browser, thus breaking out of the crash. Yahoo seems to have been having problems for some time now, possibly because its servers are oversubscribed. There have been times when I can't get into Yahoo at all, particularly at 7 a.m. (Eastern Standard), when everyone in two or more time zones in the U.S. seems to check their mail. I have broadband service via FiOS, so I'm pretty certain that the problem is at the server end.
Slightly OT comment regarding not-so-fast-ed's question: << Isn't NOVA Spanish for "doesn't go"?? >>
More or less, though I think it's a sentence fragment. The geniuses in GM didn't figure that out for years after introducing the Chevy Nova in 1963, then wondered why it didn't sell in areas with high Hispanic populations. But before throwing more stones at GM, please consider that there have been similar mistakes (or near-mistakes) by organizations that should have known better.
Example 1: About 45 years ago, the numerous affiliated Standard Oil companies (now Exxon Mobil) were in the process of reorganizing and looking to adopt a single name for the entire corporation. One of the news magazines (Newsweek, I think) reported that the corporation researched nearly every significant language in the world to ensure that any name selected would be either an innocuous translation or nonsense letters in another language. A close call: the magazine stated that one of the company names under consideration, Enco, was a slang Japanese term for a stalled automobile. To be safe, the corporation selected the nonsense name, "Exxon."
Example 2—my favorite: For years I lived in El Paso, Texas, which is across the river from Juarez, Mexico, and itself has a huge Hispanic population. There exists an international organization named Mensa, which has as its only membership requirement a report attesting that the prospective member has scored in the top two percent of the general population on any one of a number of generally recognized tests of reasoning ability. ("Mensa" is the Latin word for "table," representing the notion of a table being a forum for informal discussions among intelligent people.) The local El Paso chapter of Mensa operated under a severe recruiting handicap: Seems that in local barrio Spanish slang along the US-Mexico border, "Mensa" translates loosely as "stupid woman"—but is worse, apparently being both sexist and sexually insulting. (I have never been able to find the word in a Spanish-English dictionary, but I heard about it from so many bilingual residents of El Paso in the 1970s that I'm convinced that it is—or was—authentic.) What made the story doubly weird was that the moderator of El Paso's Mensa chapter, an elderly Anglo gentleman whom I knew personally, could not understand for several years why his automobile's vanity license plate ("Mensa") caused so many giggles or outright laughs when he stopped for gasoline.
Question: Have any of our members in the Republic of Texas ever encountered "Mensa" in its Spanish context?
