The Vergatario

A $15 cell phone, sponsored by the Venezuelan government, seemingly named after a slang term for penis – verga.

The Vergatario cell phone, which is manufactured by the 85 percent state-owned company Vetelca, was unveiled recently by Hugo Chávez, who used it to call his mother during the Mother’s Day broadcast of his weekly television show. Rory Carroll reported in The Guardian:

Priced just $15 … the phone has a camera, WAP internet access, FM radio and MP3 and MP4 players for music and videos. And it has that name.

Why the president chose it remains unclear, but he enunciates each syllable with a grin. Some laugh, others are affronted.

Verga is slang for penis and Vergatario is a newly minted word which signifies “excellent” but retains connotations from its root. …

A government subsidy which cut the retail price to a quarter of the manufacturing cost is likely to make the Vergatario an immediate hit.

There is a waiting list for the first 10,000 units expected to be released this week. Production this year has been set at 600,000, rising to 2m in 2011, when the government hopes to export the model to the Caribbean and then further afield.

Noting that reaction to the Vergatario was mixed, Carroll observed, “Chavez, a decade in power, is a shrewd communicator who often uses salty expressions to mark himself out as a man of the people.”

Update | The Guardian has reported that President Chávez “denies name of $15 Vergatario handset derives from slang word for penis.” Rory Carroll wrote:

The Guardian was mistaken – the name of the mobile phone is not vulgar and his mother has no reason to blush: Hugo Chávez has defended the Vergatario.

Venezuela’s president used a televised speech to rebut the paper’s report earlier this week that some Venezuelans had been offended by the handset’s name, which is derived from a slang word for penis.

“In the Guardian they think it’s something rude. That is a big mistake. They are ignorant,” he said. …

In a televised address to ministers at Caracas’s Miraflores palace, Chávez distanced vergatario from verga, slang for penis. He cited the Spanish language reference dictionary, the Real Academia Española, which defined vergatario as an adjective signifying quality and value.

The Guardian said the word denoted excellence but that some Venezuelans considered it vulgar. Part of the Real Academia’s definition – “adj. vulg. Ven” – acknowledges the connotation. Residents of Venezuela’s second city, Maracaibo, are renowned for constructing swear words derived from verga.

The etymological debate spread to websites today and broke largely along political lines, with Chávez supporters championing the non-vulgar interpretation.