You say manure, I say mist

Posted on | March 19, 2009 | Comments Off

I was just reading an amusing article about ad campaigns that have tangled with linguistic borders. What sounds good in one language may not translate well into another. Verbatim translations often miss the nuances of local slang or twists on words as Clairol discovered many years ago.

Clairol had a big selling product with their curling iron called the Mist Stick. It was a huge seller, so the boffins at Clairol decided to market it world wide, with great success… except in Germany. Evidently mist translates into  German slang for manure thus the Clairol Mist Stick morphed into the German Manure Stick.

Now I can’t get the image of bewildered German farmers trying to figure out how to hook up their new Clairol Manure Stick to their tractors and I keep breaking up into giggles at the idea.

What makes me laugh even harder is another company in the US has taken the name Mist Stick (evidently they haven’t done a product name search before taking the name) and applied it to their product. It’s called the Cool Mist Stick – a hose that sticks into a large stick thing and sprays a mist (of water) to cool yourself and kids down. Let’s just hope they don’t try to sell it in Germany.

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