Krika

I wasn't going to dignify this issue with a blog entry, but since people keep asking me about it, I guess I have to --

Recently, some supposed names for summer BIONICLE sets hit the Internet, among them "Krika." Some web surfers discovered that there is a site that identifies "krika" as a slang term for something bad. They immediately PM'd me about it in a semi-panic, so I spent my morning doing some research. Here is what I have found out:

-- The site claims that the word is used in Puerto Rican or Cuban urban areas, however a check of Spanish dictionary sites reveals that krika has no meaning in Spanish -- so this is a slang term, not a part of the actual language.

-- The same site that lists krika as meaning something bad also lists the following words as meaning a bodily part, a bodily function, or something else that would be inappropriate to discuss here:

* Chair
* Fabric softener
* Machete
* Macaroni
* M&M
* Table
* Pacemaker
* Oh, by the way -- the site also lists BZP as a term referring to a party drug. But we know BZPower doesn't refer to that, right? Right.

And that's just a small sample. There are 160 pages of urban slang terms just starting with the letter K! Any word, in any language, can be used as a slang term for something bad -- does that mean we should no longer use any of the words listed above in anything?

-- So what does Krika mean? Well -- Krika is a jewelry company in Montserrat that sells silver Wizard of Oz jewelry ... Krika Simo was one of the hikers who discovered the "Iceman" in 1991 .. Krika Peters was an actor in the 1960s ... and Krika is a town in Sweden. There are, in fact, 82,300 hits for krika on Google, only 1 of which refers to it as being a bad word. In fact, krika is being spread around as a bad word more on BZPower these days than anywhere else!

So my advice to everyone is to calm down and get some perspective. This is a non-issue, and it's only going to become an issue if people run around and get hysterical about it when it's not warranted.

Greg