History Main / BiteTheWaxTadpole

*** Bassoons are also called ''Fagotten'' in German. There's a famous story about Music/JohannSebastianBach in which the famous composer gets into a fistfight with a student of his, whom he called a ''Zippelfagottist''--"nanny-goat bassoonist" in German. This causes much snickering in English-speaking music history students even if they don't know what Bach's insult means.

** And the Cornish gave us pasties (pronounced "PASS-tees"), a wrapped pastry case filled with beef, potatoes, turnips, and onions. These then spread to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, parts of Minnesota and Montana, and other places Cornish miners went. When people outside these areas read about eating pasties, they may be alarmed, and with good reason.

*** It ''actually'' means "Can mouth, can happy" ("can" here is in the "is able to" sense).

* The new animation studio founded by HideakiAnno in 2006 is called "Studio Khara", named after the Greek word for "happiness" or "joy". Unfortunately, "khara" is also an Arabic slang word that means "shit"...

* Coca-Cola labels written in Arabic suffer a similar problem. Ink keeping with the traditional cursive style of lettering, instead of saying Coca-Cola, which would actually be kuka kula in Arabic, the first vowel in each words (the "wow", which makes the "u" sound) is connected to the next consonant, which makes the words most closely resemble "kfka kfla" or "kqka kqla."

* IKEA got in trouble when it advertised its "Gutvik" brand bunk beds in Germany -- because while "Gutvik" is the name of a town in Sweden, it's an explicit sexual reference in German. [[hottip:*:Albeit a grammatically wrong one; it sounds a lot like the expression "guter Fick," meaning "good fuck" or "good lay." ''Gut'' without an ending here wouldn't make sense.]]

** Those Morons are probably named after Moron, Spain, which is coincidentally the site of a NATO air base. This was used as a joke in ''{{Franchise/Terminator}} 3'', when Moron briefly appears as one of the first two bases seized by Skynet[[hottip:*:The other is {{Franchise/Batman}}, Turkey]]

* Here in Iceland, I rent my apartment from a company called "Fagmenn" (it means "Professionals"). You can also go down to the mall and see signs outside Hagkaup advertizing "Krap" (like a slushee, krap means slush. And yeah, pretty much everyone here speaks enough English to get why all this would be amusing).

* There is or was a German automotive-component manufacturer called KKK, initials infamously shared with an American racist hate group.

* I cannot ''believe'' this wasn't here already, but Colgate toothpaste didn't do so well in Spanish-speaking countries; in Spanish, "colgate" is a direct command to "hang yourself".

** Not the village itself, note. Its inhabitants (presumably, quite a dour bunch) are actually dead tired of English-speaking tourists stealing their entry signs and generally coming just to make fun of their village's name, and actively contemplating changing it to something ''less'' amusing. The brewery using that trick is from ''Germany'', and probably wrestled that permission from Fucking's council under a gunpoint.

*** In fairness, English has [[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/faggot multiple meanings for the word]], including "bundle of sticks for firewood" and "meatballs from OopNorth".

*** Also, great advertising: "[[Music/TheBeatles So you say you want a Revolution?]]"

* Pepsi has a similar myth, the slogan "Come alive! You're in the Pepsi Generation" was [[http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/ancestor.asp allegedly]] mistranslated in China as "Pepsi brings your ancestors BackFromTheDead." This gets a ShoutOut in MassEffect2, where the soft drink Tupari Sport is advertised with the slogan "Tupari: Brings your ancestors back from the grave!"