'Hold Your Wee for a Wii' Death Shuts Down Show - Gameworld Network news story Ten employees have lost their jobs over the incident, and the radio show is permanently off the air. ....

28 year old Jennifer Strange was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home on Friday. A preliminary coroner’s report indicated the death “was consistent with water intoxication”.

Strange was competing in the “Hold Your Wee for a Nintendo Wii” contest when she died.

“Metaphors can kill.” This is how George Lakoff began his famous article on Metaphor and War about the language surrounding the first Gulf War. However, the world of the tropes is powerful at even deeper levels than mappings between well-structured conceptual domains. There is nothing that links the Nintendo game console and drinking water than the sound resemblance of Wii with a euphemism for urination, the result of drinking water. This in itself is an example of metonymic chaining (as in ‘you can fin these ideas in the library’) but the metonymy is driven by sound connection rather then any ‘real world’ contiguity. However, this auditory contiguity is not purely subconscious (although the polysemic/plurisemic nature of the sound makes oscillations inevitable) but is negotiated. From the moment the new name for a product codenamed Nintendo Revolution was announced, a lively debate was held over the advisability of the new name and how its various sound resemblances (urine, small, exclamation of excitement, we) would make it less appealing. All those predictions proved inaccurate and in the gaming community are only infrequently remarked upon, anymore. However, the non-expert public has only started its process of negotiating the assimilation of the polysemic construction. And this contest is one example of such negotiation.

It is also an example of the importance of symbolic structures in social interaction. There are many ways the Wiis could have been given out but the one with most symbolic connections was chosen - and it is the one that has gained most attention and resulted in this death (which in itself has unleashed a whole slew of ritual symbolic behavior). In short, people are willing to go a long way for symbolic cohesive harmony.