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December 8, In a series of comments on a recent postStephen Jones observed that "The Iranians have a detergent dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle 'Barf'"; and Language Hat explained that "That would be because barf is the Farsi word for 'snow'"; and Merri added this:.
The trouble is, these stories about cross-language branding disasters generally turn out to be urban legends. I dissected one of them a few months ago, dealing with the alleged fate of the Ford Pinto brand in Brazil " The Factoid Acquisition Device ".
And we've discussed a number of other such legends over the years, with the result so that I've come to wonder whether any of the language-related stories that marketing professors tell their students are ever true.
So this morning, purely as an academic exercise, I decided to spend a few minutes looking into the legend of Dreft and Dreck. Merri didn't invent this story — it's out there, in one version or another, both in the blogosphere and in at least two published books. Thus in a recent blog post " Today is Cyber Monday. Would not have been my first choice. So based upon brand recognition, they created Drek.
They pulled the name after trying to sell to the first Jewish wholesaler in Chicago. A joke to this effect must have been independently invented many times from the s onward, and such jokes are often re-interpreted as history. The "snippet view" dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle enough information to allow me to reconstruct this passage of advice on choosing a new brand name:.
Conduct interviews with users to screen the list down. Ask what the brands on your list mean. When down to less than 10 candidates, get a legal check on their availability and ….
Crawford and Di Benedetto were not the first to tell this story. Suburbia in the Seventies This dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle I was not able to recover the complete passage, but with in internal ellipsis, it reads:. Advertising plans, layouts, and schedules were drawn up to present Dreck to the American … Hastily, the name of the new soap powder was changed to Dreft.
The Wikipedia article on Dreft takes the lexicographical influence back in the other direction, asserting that. The term dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle has entered the vernacular as a synonym for feces, as newborns tend to produce copious amounts of it. However, the article offers no evidence for this assertion, and I haven't been able to find any genuine examples of the alleged vernacular usage.
One additional aspect of the situation is indicated by this commercialsaid to be from for showing in cinemaswhich underlines the fact that Dreft was then marketed as a dishwashing detergent. It's not clear to me whether it was simultaneously marketed as a laundry detergent, or if the laundry applications came later. If you have any evidence to add, please supply it in the comments section — there's no prohibition against double jeopardy for urban legends. But whatever issues this may have raised in other countries, the Paxan company has not felt the need to change its brand.
I don't know if this has already been covered in this blog, but I can point out a similar case which is not a myth: Mitsubishi Pajero has another name Montero in Spain, because "pajero" is Spanish for "wanker". I have to confess that this does seem to be a case where a story about a cross-language naming blunder seems to be true, at least linguistically speaking. And that was in the early 80s IIRC.
I'm not sure she wants her name being written here, but that sounds like a fairly direct source. Aw, next you'll be telling us that Coke or was it Pepsi?
I recall a sandwich chain called Jreck Subs that provided no end of amusement among my Jewish friends and me once they explained the joke. Dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle been around for years, though, so the dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle similarity does not appear to have damaged them. December 8, 1: What a ridiculous misuse of language.
I'm sure there are many far superior analogies than that one. German dreck "dirt" is less offensive, I am told, than Yiddish drek, but it would leap out at any German speaker as an inappropriate dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle for a cleaning product.
I haven't set foot in Iran sincebut I'm pretty sure I remember that there was a detergent called Barf back in the '70s. In Iran they never recognized foreign trademarks, so pirated versions of major international brands with slightly altered names were common. My favorite was always the chewing gum labeled "Wrigglers". December 8, 2: If anyone was wondering about the full quote from the Stephen Birmingham book, here it is using tried-and-true snippet-outwitting tactics:. Advertising plans, layouts, and schedules were drawn up to present Dreck to the American soap-buying public.
Only at the last moment — and in the nick of time — was it discovered that dreck is a Yiddish word meaning "dirt. For the marketing slogan, see the Snopes page. It was that "helps 'em come alive" thrust of the marketing campaign that provided the focus for an enduring legend about Pepsi: When the ads were ported to China, Pepsi sales dropped precipitously because the Chinese parsed this bit as a promise that the substance would reanimate dead ancestors.
This tale is dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle as revealed truth in numerous business blunder books and has made its way into innumerable news stories about Pepsi and marketing lore. The problem is, though the story has often been repeated, it has yet to be substantiated. The Snopes discussion dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle points out that the specific location Taiwan? As for the "bird urine" part, that one's new to me, and apparently to Google.
Can you provide a link, or did you just make it up for fun? I always slightly cringe at Unilever's rationalising its UK brand name "Jif" to the international form " Cif ". December 8, 3: I'm wondering about another approach to this. Do people really care whether a name for something is a homophone with a word with negative connotations?
Let's imagine this urgan legend:. John means bathroom or customer of a prostitute, but that doesn't dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle people named John very much. Also, branding research shows that people are not necessarily turned off by brand names like "yahoo. December 8, 4: I remember an item some years ago on BBC radio regarding car number plates, which in the UK as elsewhere have a three-letter component. Disappointingly, several easily pronounceable combinations do not occur, and it was alleged that there are bureaucrats specifically tasked by the Department of Transport with the duty of expunging combinations that might give offence, not only to tender-minded Anglophones, but to speakers of other languages too.
The fearless reporter, in a spirit of enquiry, had decided to investigate the prohibited combinations; while some were obvious, others were not; it was specifically alleged in the programme that one was banned for suggesting a rude word in Serbo-Croat. I've emailed Mark dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle photo of Barf detergent so hopefully he'll be able to put it up.
Interestingly it was only when a colleague in Saudi showed me the dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle that I found out what 'barf' meant. You lesser mortals may barf, but I puke. I once had a Mitsubishi Pajero a superb example of Australian carmaking. I bought it off the Sri Lankan ambassador in Saudi when the government changed and he got sacked.
Lovely vehicle; did sixty thousand kilometers in eight months with it. It is still the vehicle of choice for the Sri Lankan elite, politicians and gangsters often the same people. In the approach of one would fill you with terror as they were used to disappear suspected JVC insurgents. Nowadays you get disappeared by men in Toyota Hiace white vans, which shows a definite decline in the class of the average government kidnapper. Dave Barry claimed that Coca Cola means "bite the wax tadpole" in Chinese, presumably dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle a spoof of this sort of business school story.
I very much doubt that this "bite the wax tadpole" thing is true, but I don't think Dave Barry made it up. What I've always wondered about in this connection is why some multinational brands have different names even when there's no obvious taboo to motivate the difference. What motivates these differences? I knew some people who lived in Hertfordshire whose car carried the registration letters KUT, which is very rude indeed in Dutch, something which rather undermines your BBC dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle … they took their car to Amsterdam and couldn't understand why people kept looking at it and sniggering ….
December 8, 5: Just to follow up on Cameron's comment, when I was in Iran recently I did not see Barf detergent, but it does seem the concept has been exported. I saw the detergent http: Since I had heard of its existence from others who had seen in it Persian-speaking countries, I immediately took a picture of it. When I asked a supermarket employee where it came from, he said "I don't know — Iran or Tajikistan".
The writing on the side is in several Caucasian languages, so its current iteration may be more localized, dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle at least the product of smart marketing.
I'm not sure — any help here? Snopes on "bite the wax tadpole. My Spanish friends are most amused and immediately say "me meo de risa".
Am I the only English speaker here who has "dreck" as a perfectly unexceptional item in their English vocabulary? Not until I read this article did I ever hear that the word was a foreign borrowing not known to the majority of the populace. My personal and personally witnessed favourite is a washing detergent sold in Israel called "Colon".
I'm waiting for a follow-up product called "Sphincter". Some years back I attended a summer linguistics dawn dishwashing liquid taiwan export bottle in Debrecen, Hungary. One of the more popular forms of fast food eateries were these kiosks that sold Hungarian facsimiles of hamburgers among other thingsthat were pretty tastey. However what my American and British English speaking friends and I found endlessly amusing was that while they used the loanword " ham burger", for the cheeseburger they substituted the Hungarian word of cheese, "sajt", which if you know Hungarian orthographic convention, is pronounced [Sait].
So, you could order a hamburger with sajt or a sajtburger. Mark, the bird urine thing was me half or really one eighth, or worse rembering Dave Barry's "bite the wax tadpole" story — I'm glad others have a better memory than me on the subject. I think the point is that Coke's first attempt to market itself in China resulted in them just figuring out what Chinese syllables could be mashed together to approximate the sound of "Coca Cola", without regard for what they meant, with the result being the phrase in question.
If the story is true, it makes sense that the resulting phrase isn't really grammatical.
