Nintendo Urine

I'm sure you've all seen by now that the new name for the Nintendo Revolution is the Nintendo Wii. I have never in my life wanted to spend much time playing with wee, personally. Still, a rose by any other name...

Comments

[RodeoClown]

My first thoughts were exactly the same... Urine (there's no Nintendo in the name, unlike all their other products).

I can understand why they want something completely different, but I think this is a crap name (well, other orifice, but you know what I mean).

I'm pretty sure the reason they announced it now is that if they announced it at E3, everyone would talk about the name and not focus on the games.

I really think someone at Nintendo must have noticed the name... I mean, who wants to go buy a wii? It sounds filthy.

[Jack Monahan]

It's a very silly product name, but frankly a little refreshing by comparison to the decidedly un-revolutionary name Revolution. And it goes without saying that it's better than the painfully market-calculated name of X-Box 360. Bring on the Wii!

[Patrick Dugan]

Whats interesting about Wii is not only how it will shape itself to (and in turn, shape) the cultural context in which it becomes common, but how it will shape to each language that uses it. In Japanese it is pronounced with two syllables "ui" and "ii" which means "double" and "good", respectively. In french it phonetically correlates to oui, which means "yes". In English, in order to avoid connatations of urine or gentials, it sounds much better when used without an article. "We're developing a port for Wii," or "I'm getting Wii for Christmas" sounds much better than "the Wii" and "a Wii", in fact, while they sound silly as hell in the latter uses, it sounds pretty slick just by itself.

Whats most interesting about the English fit for Wii is that its phallic connotations are only hieghtened when used in a possesive sense, like "lets play with my Wii" or "have you seen my Wii?". People will naturally be encouraged by social taboo to avoid using the term in a posessive sense, saying instead "lets play Wii," or "have you seen Wii? Its a pretty slick machine."

The hip will catch on at first, looking down on juvenille punks behind the curve using it with articles and in possesive tenses. Eventually we will all be down with Wii.

[Chris]

It's certainly garnered a lot of discussion from all quarters.

I don't follow where you get the Japanese pronunciation from. 'Wii' isn't a legitimate word in conventional Japanese...; I assume it would be '[Wa-(subscript)i]+i' unless it uses the obsolete character 'Wi' - which I have no idea what it used to look like! But 'ii' does indeed mean good, which is a luckier connotation than in English.