GM selling cars in Mexico that "don't go." Microsoft thesaurus laying eggs. Chatting with the washerwoman in Japan. Addressing a black man in the South. "Harangue" rebutted by Oak Park editor . . .

From Mid-July, 1996, edition . . .

Language is a funny thing . . . As in General Motors trying to sell its Chevrolet Nova in Mexico some years back, never thinking that "no va" in Spanish means "doesn't go." For Chevrolet it also meant "doesn't move," as out of showrooms.

More recently, Microsoft, led by the world's richest man, Bill "Greetings" Gates, peddled a software thesaurus with linguistic boo-boos to beat all. (A thesaurus is what you get by pushing alt-something else to decide what other word you might use than the one coming first to mind.)

This Microsoft Word Spanish-language thesaurus came up with some stunning transmogrifications, as told in the 7/8/96 Wall St. Journal. For black people, for instance, it suggested man-eater, cannibal, and barbarian. Great. For people of mixed race, bastard. For lesbian, vicious and perverse. For Indians, man-eating savages.

Microsoft has its excuses and promises to change things, but the language coup of the week was scored by historian Fernando Benitez, who told a Mexico City newspaper, "Those who made this thesaurus are imbeciles and cretins."

Language funny thing, part 2 . . . Wall St. Journal also told a few weeks back of the can't-go-home-again experience of the Japanese executive returning to Japan after years in the U.S. with Motorola. He was reprimanded by a superior for chatting with a washerwoman. Executives don't do that, he was told.

Meanwhile, in Germany a publisher with an American owner has a CEO who normally does not use first names with business associates. "Herr This," "Herr That" does just fine in Deutschland. But his American boss goes by "Jack." The poor guy has to switch gears whenever he's on the phone with Jack, from proper German to proper American.

Here's another: One of the many black Southerners who came up to Chicago in the mid-'60s with Martin Luther King was Billups, a tall, dignified man with glasses who had a distinguished World War II military record, we were told, sitting in folding chairs in a Roosevelt Road storefront.

Billups told of being addressed down South in his home town by his first name by a white bank teller who called white customers by the respectful "Mister." Billups, a cool cat, drew on his Chicago experience where first names implied friendship and informed the teller of that curious phenomenon. The teller drew herself up, affronted, but thereafter called him "Mr. Billups."

Finally, Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" was translated into French, then re-translated by Twain himself, "clawed back into a civilized language once more by patient, unremunerated toil," as he put it.

Meanwhile, racism as usual . . . This in the pages of none other than our esteemed Wednesday Kernel of Truth and Accuracy, which opened its pages to letter-writer Dean R., who said some unmentionable, if not unthinkable things, such as:

"After 30 years and trillions (spent) on social programs, most blacks have failed to take advantage of opportunities. This is always blamed on white racism." He went on to say he hopes black youths are stopped more often by police than whites: "Who is committing the crimes in this town? Elderly Jewish women?" Oak Park's "dirty little secret" is that we don't discuss these things. The local gang task force "blatantly ignores them."

He went on further, decrying "whites-as-oppressors claptrap . . . magnified and perpetuated by an out-of-touch group of elitists." He closed with: "Poor, poor victimized black males."

"It is so easy to give in to race," responded the Kernel's editor in a column two weeks later. "Every day the temptation is there. In each of us are . . . the fundamentally racist impulses that sometimes seem born into us, or nearly so."

Among suspect, even racist thoughts he himself has: "I'm nervous about those black teenage boys in the car idling next to me at the light" and "My child's teacher is black. That's wonderful but it's different."

He decides he's "basically not" racist, but admits to "racial biases" and says the "challenge is to check the impulse" to see things through "a prism of race," to "remain open enough" so you judge people "not on skin color." [Good advice!]

But Dean R. "has failed these challenges" with his "harangue," the editor wrote, adding that it's no surprise that "a lot" of Oak Park crime is black crime, because Oak Park is "on the edge of a black ghetto." But "all black people don't commit crimes." [?Quite a concession!]