Saturday, March 03, 2007

the word "beamer"

Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a "beamer". He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).

Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it's a better option than the word "projector". The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it's pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn't be a problem.

6 comments:

Alexander Toresson said...

In swedish the words 'projektor' and 'kanon' are used for this. (Yes, 'kanon' means cannon).

Anonymous said...

Sure there is a problem. I recently discovered that my girl friend’s family had a beamer (after one year) which I would have used a lot to watch movies with her. So I told a co worker „I know my girl friend for so long and only now I hear that they have a beamer”, and surely he was surprised that didn’t know about their car…

Of course, would it indeed be a BMW I wouldn’t care less. Who cares about cars anyways :-)

Anonymous said...

Beamer is cricket slang for something aimed at your eyes ...

Anonymous said...

And then there is 'handy' being used for cellular phone. That one is probably harder to get.

Unknown said...

In french, we use "projecteur" and "barco", which is a well known belgian brand name ( http://www.barco.com/ ). Basically, it's the same schema as in swedish ;-)

Samat said...

Usually "beamer" refers to BMW motorcycles; "bimmer" refers to BMW cars.