You're better off with a Spazz
James Meek
Monday October 17, 2005
The Guardian
All things considered, I'd rather not be obliged to buy a wheelchair in the near future. But should the day come, I would choose a wheelchair like the one I see on this website here,
http://www.colourswheelchair.com. It's sleek, low-slung and shiny, and it radiates the potency of energetic movement. According to the website, it offers me "the style, versatility and adjustability you need in your first wheelchair. With its simple design and clean lines, not only will you look good in your 'Spazz', but your manoeuvrability will be unsurpassed."
I'm sorry, did you say "Spazz"? In the US, where the wheelchair is made, "spaz" - according to the Online Slang Dictionary at Berkeley University - means "a person who often acts in an irrational or spontaneous fashion". In other words, edgy and romantic. In Britain, of course, it's a derogatory abbreviation of "spastic". In the playground of my school, where it was in free and frequent use, it meant "hopeless, idiotic, incompetent fool".
The marketing of the wheelchair in Britain, by a Tonbridge company, Kent Mobility, has been met with hostility by lobby groups such as Scope. No one, after all - as far as I know - sells a brand of glasses called Speccy 4 Eyez, or a range of artificial limbs under the name Kripple.
At first glance, the arrival of the Spazz on our shores looks like the latest in a long line of international brand pratfalls. The Mitsubishi Pajero 4X4, which translated as Mitsubishi Wanker in Spanish; the British curry sauce range that came out, in Punjabi, as Sharwood's Arse; the Toyota MR2, which sounded rather like the Toyota Merde to the French; or the original transliteration of Coca-Cola into Chinese, which caused many possible readings, one of which was "bite the wax tadpole"; or Nestlé's one-time translation into Chinese of the name of its baby-milk powder Lactogen, which came out as "forcing you to vomit the essence". In 1976, sales of a popular Chinese car battery in Britain sank when it began marketing under a translation of the Chinese name, White Elephant.
But is this a pratfall? Or are the makers of Spazz wheelchairs in search of notoriety? This is the tactic of the makers of the popular French fizzy drink, Pschitt. The thing about English rude words is that half the rest of the world knows and uses them too. On the company's French website, visitors are knowingly invited, in English, to "Pschitt themselves" and to buy a line of FCUK-style T-shirts with such slogans as "100% Pschitt" and "Dealer de Pschitt".
In fact, as might be expected from a firm whose other wheelchair lines have names like Boing!, Krypto and Xtreme, the Californian maker of the Spazz, Colours 'N Motion, is not a staid or conventional health equipment supplier. Run by disabled people, its models are young, tattooed, pierced. One of the epithets it uses to describe its wheelchairs is "Bitchin'".
So far, Kent Mobility isn't backing off from selling the Spazz. Its managing director, John Payne, says he has sold five or six Spazzes in Britain so far. "Colours broke the mould, and it's about time somebody did," he says. "If it upsets any customer that the chair is designed for, such as abled, active wheelchair users, we'll consider changing the name, or taking the label off. If it upsets disabled lobbying groups, tough"
) as "the stick." I guess that this could be interpreted in an innuendo-rich fashion. 
