Provenance
- Languages
- English → Spanish
- Source
- Repeated in marketing textbooks and business press; contradicted by contemporaneous sales records
- Source date
- 1970
- Verification
- apocryphalWidely repeated. No primary source has been found.
- Mechanism
- None — the reading it depends on is not how the phrase parses
Input
Nova
Mechanism
None — the reading it depends on is not how the phrase parses
Inference
Printed
no va
Observed
The story is that the Chevrolet Nova sold badly in Spanish-speaking markets because buyers read the name as no va — it does not go.
Why it is apocryphal#
The car sold adequately in the markets the story concerns. Nova and no va are not homophones in ordinary speech; the stress falls differently and the juncture is audible. And the reading the anecdote requires — a brand name parsed as a two-word sentence — is not one speakers volunteer unless someone points at it first.
What it is doing in a corpus of real artefacts#
There is no artefact. That is the entry.
Two of this field’s most repeated cases turn out to be stories rather than objects, and both are repeated by people who would not accept a claim on that evidence in their own subject. A course that teaches reconstruction from evidence has to be able to say which of its own examples are not evidence, on the same page as the examples that are.
The thing to notice#
Both apocryphal entries flatter the reader. One says machines are stupid; the other says a large company was careless in a way you would not have been. Neither survives a citation chain. Whether that is a coincidence is week 3’s argument.