January 22, 2018
A few days ago I was sitting on the corner of a local bar, not far from the sign where the pedestrian zone ends. Cona, the sign reads, with a picture of a walking woman and a child crossed out below this.
A group of young people walked by and a woman stopped at the sign.
“What does this mean?” she asked her friend, presumably a local.
”It means an area,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said, “do you know what this means in Portuguese? A pussy.”
The answer was a bit too much even for the eavesdropper I am, so I had to check online whether this was true – and it was. In fact, the word is of even lower register, imagine the worst possible sounding word in English: that is what cona means in Portuguese.
It thus might be quite a shock for a Portuguese-speaking person walking round Ljubljana, this word jumping at them from every corner, I thought.
Well, it could be worse. I read online that Cona is a very popular surname in certain parts of Italy.
