Last year, Gelf wrote about the troubles that the press has had with translating foreign expressions into English. One of the slang phrases that had caused the most trouble was the Spanish word pendejo, especially after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took to calling George Bush exactly that. The New York Times recently had similar troubles with the word.

In a post about (what may be) the final installment of the Orange County Weekly's popular and crude ¡Ask A Mexican!® series, Mike Nizza of the Times's The Lede blog reproduced this sentence from Gustavo Arellano's column:

It's been a great run, cabrones, but all the hateful e-mail, the attacks by PC pendejos and the fact that few of you have bothered to submit video questions to my YouTube channel wear on a guy, you know?

Later, though, the pendejos and cabrones were removed from Nizza's post, and the following correction was added: "An earlier version of this post included verbatim the two Spanish epithets Mr. Arellano used, but since we wouldn't use their English equivalents, we've now removed them.—Ed."

Of course, depending on tone, meaning, and even country where it's used, pendejo can mean anything from "pubic hair" to "jerk" to "asshole." Perhaps realizing that there are no true English equivalents, the Times once again updated the post, this time with a simple note: "Updated to remove two Spanish expletives."