Going downtown has its benefits. I went there on Saturday for the rugby, or at least as far as the Riviera Road offramp, and as a result I now speak Micra.
Micra - the language - is the conceit of whoever does this little car`s advertising. I thought at first that the agency was kidding when, on billboards along the M1, it offered up the neologism "spafe" as a cool new thing to say. But it wasn`t. (I should note that it is pronounced with poncey e-queen Cape Town accent*, judging from the radio campaign.)
The reason I thought somebody was having me on (aside from the accent, to which my normal reaction is to stop listening) is that Micra the car is rather cute in a PT-Cruiser/Beetle sort of way. So you can understand my surprise at decoding the name, which can only mean "Mini yet crap". Odd.
Nowhahmean?
As somebody pointed out at the time of the Cell C youth-spray paint-and-unintelligible-talk campaign, adults are not meant to understand what kids are saying. This is the youth defining itself, and you`re meant to feel left out. After paying for their top-ups, of course.
So now, on the time of people who pay their bills and salaries, the car companies want to define themselves with the help of poncey ad execs, and what they`ve come up with is "spafe", which to the jaded journalistic ear sounds like something you smoke.
To the point
Imagine my surprise when I figured out, dumb-ass that I am, that the IT industry has had its "spafes" and "modtros" for a long time. I figure Impotek had its origins in the words "important", "impotent" or "impostor", and "technology", which, together, would mean "important technology", "impotent technology" or "impostor technology"!
This is really groovy. Encouraged by my obvious wordsmithing prowess, I turned to the names of other companies in the industry. Telkom - now what could that mean? "Tel jou se"eninge voor die ergste kom"? Idion? "Idiom of the Catalan"? "Idiotic @-sign"? And Caritor? Clearly some brilliant minds were at work here.
I marvel at the evocations of operating theatres and invasive procedures in "Introstat", the Swedish car pride in Ivolve ("I Volvo drive"), the debauched Scottish partying in Spartan (spilt whisky on tartan), the subliminal Scotland/Microsoft OEM partnership message in Tarsus ("tartan Software Update Services")... the list goes on.
Me too!
Imagine my surprise when I figured out, dumb-ass that I am, that the IT industry has had its "spafes" and "modtros" for a long time.
Carel Alberts, special editions editor, ITWeb Brainstorm
The Americans are clever this way. They`ve come up with things like e-tailing, he-mail (male-dominated e-mail), butt-legging (cigarette bootlegging) and on and on. And others adopt it. The amazing thing is, the people who come up with it are anonymous. They`re not even in advertising. And they manage to change other people`s vocabularies.
There are many things advertisers want us to do, and they don`t mind if we look stupid doing them. They want us to do things like learn Micra, say "do the Wimpy sizzle, tss, tss" every time you think of breakfast, make often mention of "Miller Time", say "Hello Moto!" (I started doing this as irony, but nobody got it and now I`m stuck with it) and whistle-speak "thirty sixfff" every time we see a tomato sauce bottle.
I think males are more prone to this sort of thing (it belongs in the same class as air-guitar world championships), and our readiness to do this is why Micra has an outside chance of taking off. It already has in some ways. Look at Soweto (South-Western Townships) and Soshanguve (Sotho, Shangaan, Nguni and Venda).
* This phrase was inspired by Hagen Engler`s article: Reasons Why Cape Town Can F*ck Off
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