September 2012 - Rocky Mountain Region Porsche Club - Porsche ...

i get around Dick Badler
22
What’s in a
name?
So I was meeting
with a lawyer, and we
got onto the subject
of luxury goods and, out of the blue, he
blurted out, “Taj Hayaaa?”
I said, “What?”
So he repeated it, again, “Taj Hayaaa?”
This time, I said, “What are you talking
about?”
And, with that, he pointed to my wrist
and said, “Your watch, your watch!”
“Oh,” I said, “TAG Heuer. It’s a TAG Heuer.
TAG, like tag you’re it. Technique d’Avant
Garde. A company run by Mansour Ojjeh,
who is also a large investor in McLaren
International, although he sold the watch
business to LVMH in 1999.
“And Heuer is for Jack Heuer, who
ran the eponymous family-owned watch
company for many years, and pretty much
invented the chronograph, until he sold the
company to TAG in 1985.”
“I see,” he said. “You know a lot more
about this than I do.”
I laughed. Because I really don’t. I just
knew the derivation of my watch. When it
comes to the correct pronunciation of all
sorts of things automotive, I’m as lost as
my legal friend.
Take anything German.
I don’t speak the language. So any
terminology is totally lost on me. I know
the world is divided three ways in German,
HighGear
September 2012
male, female and neuter. But I’ll be damned
if I know which one a car is. And English
translations are no help.
Unless we read Shakespeare. Because
then we know that Porsche is pronounced
like the heroine in The Merchant of Venice,
Portia.
But… the clouds can still thicken. Many
times I’ve heard the French pronounce our
favorite marque, without the “ah” at the
end. And, if you know something about
French pronunciation, you know that’s not
necessarily incorrect… at least in France.
What, then, about Ruf? Alois Ruf?
For an answer, I’ll throw this out. I read
somewhere that the pronunciation might
seem like a dog bark, but it’s not. Rather,
it’s like the top of your house… at least in
German.
Then there’s the tag line Volkswagen
uses in its commercials, “das Auto.”
Is that, like, really a German term? Or
something the ad agency for VW dreamed
up, after too many “biers” in Wolfsburg? I
haven’t a clue. But I do think they should
be careful, or they’ll follow the fate of
Renault’s “Le Car.”
It’s no better in Italian.
I once tried to impress some Italians,
when a Ferrari drove by, by saying “Che
bella machina,” literally. They politely
corrected me with, “Deeka, eet ees ‘Kay
bella makkina.’”
I need to find them again. It took me
years to master KOON-tash, and now I
keep grappling with Lamborghini’s latest
supercar, the Aventador. In the May 2012
issue of Road & Track, they test the landbased
stealth fighter, and they parse the
name this way: ah-ven-tah-door.
That’s fine, but where’s the accent? There
has to be an accent, right? Something you
time to coincide with a tossing of one’s arm,
in one big gesticulation. To me, it could fall
on the second, third or fourth syllable…
and still sound like you’re throwing coins
in the Trevi Fountain.
The Asians seem good at anglicizing, in
order to make it easier for us poor, myopic
Americans. For example, I know the
camera is pronounced NEE-kon in Japan.
And the car is a HUN-diii in Korea.
But then they have lapses in judgment.
How else do you explain the Suzuki
Kizashi? It sounds like an alternative to the
tempura plate, sushi on the side.
At least we don’t have to deal with, this
side of the pond, some of the more esoteric
nomenclature of our European cousins,
cars like the Donkevoort, the Koenigsegg
and the Renault Megane.
I did, however, recently have a mystery
solved. I was pondering what could
possibly be the pronunciation for Horatio
Pagani’s latest creation, the Huayra, when
I came across the answer. Dan Neil
actually reviewed the car in his August 11,
2012 column in The Wall Street Journal,
on Italian turf, by the way, so he has to
be right. He parsed the name this way,
WAY-ra.
Thank you, Dan. I wouldn’t have known.