Whilst out shopping at the local shopping centre I came across these products. Having my camera phone with me, I decided to document them for posterity...

I quite like the one warning against throwing your mobile in the bin

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ooops forgot this one.

When I first looked in the freezer in Migros, I thought it said "Porn Stars!!"

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That's exactly what happened to me when I saw those for the first time.

Well...guess what I thought when I saw this for the first time... :-D

i remember years ago seeing the French version of co-co pops which were called "plop plops"!

Not sure if they are still around or whether they have been lost to march of global branding...

brilliant - brought back happy memories of being in Japan

That kind of fun works within the country as well, particularly when the people in charge of marketing and advertising are Swiss-German who speak a bit of French but not enough to prevent some "lost in translation" stuff. A couple of exemples, both from Migros:

- A new chocolate bar with nuts is launched, named Bonanuss. Sounds fine in German but in French, it reads like "Good *******".

- At Xmas you can buy chocolate pine fruit, called in French "Pives de Noel". Some genius called them instead "Pines de Noel" - Xmas cocks, cue product recall...

Wonder if there is any connection??!

It didn't get any better - if it's the same one, it's now called 'bona splitter', which sounds like a time-share on a porn set.

Here's another one. Spotted in the Coop although intended for the Americans amongst us.

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It also works the same with some of our English food. I was talking about the apparent English love of fish and chips with a swiss friend and mentioned a common thing to have as a side dish is mushy peas. Cue a look of shock followed by an explantion that "mushy" in swiss can also mean a certain part of a woman's anatomy. Also managed to turn to this friends mother and when explaining about reindeer at Christmas and the names from the song "rudolph the red nosed reindeer" found that "vixen" also has a completely different meaning here...................

there's an art magazine here called "pharts"
i thought it was funny...

I work for a financial institution. One product we use is an index produced by the London Stock Exchange, called the FTSE (pronounced "Footsie"). Outside of work and in German, that term means something slightly different...
I've got to say though, I've never figured out its (Deutsch) level of vulgarity... ie is it a medical term that a doctor would say to a patient, or is it a guys sitting around drinking beer kind of word, or extremely uncommon, or ...

Hmmm I thought I knew pretty much all the rude words in German but a vulgar word that sounds like "footsie"?

You don't mean "furz" (fart) do you?

He means "futz" ... which means .... let's say a part of women's anatomy that begins with the letter c.

yep, I can confirm this words tops the vulgarity scale in German for that particular part of the female anatomy...I hate hearing it and never, ever use it myself - definitely not a word common to conversation here, except for maybe the would-be gangster boys and such. But even their mother would smack them upside the head for using it.

Thanks for that. I wasn't too sure if it was a direct equivalent of the "c" word, or of the more medical "v" word, or conversely if it was mild enough for eg toilet-training toddlers, or if even it was just some obscure Deutsch slang word...

no problem, bubbles. I don't have kids myself, but I would guess the medical "v" word is fine for toddlers.

Thanks. I knew that word but pronounced it differently!!

I would too, if I wasn't ladylike enough to avoid it altogether! Ok, I can explain it by using a similar German word: Fotzelschnitten, which is French toast. The word in contention would be pronounced like the first syllable of that word, minus the "l". Sound it out, just not in public