This Canadian brewery accidentally named its Beer 'Pubic Hair' in Māori
That's a bit embarrassing
I'm afraid I'm gonna have to start by talking about cars for a second. There's a very good reason why brands like BMW, Audi and Mercedes almost always use a combination of letters and numbers to name their cars. That's because Mitsubishi introduced the Pajero a while ago, only to find out that the word is used to describe somebody who likes... spending time on their own in the bathroom in Spanish-speaking countries in South America. I'm saying this because there's a Canadian brewery that's been selling a special hopped pale ale in New Zealand for years and they've now realized that the name of the beer means 'pubic hair'. Well, now.
Hell's Basement has been selling their Huruhuru beer for a while and the name officially means 'feather in Māori*. As it turns out, the term is also colloquially used to refer to pubic hair, as Māori TV presenter Te Hamua Nikora explained in a recent Facebook post. Curiously enough, Coca-Cola also had a similar problem in New Zealand when they tried to merge Māori and English and the result was a bit embarrassing because they ended with a term that roughly translated to 'Hello, Death'.
Whether we like it or not, we're currently living in a PC world where everyone is very easily offended, which is why companies usually have to think twice before naming any of their products, and then they have to triple-check everything. Nikora said that the word is not offensive, "just stupid", but the presenter also added that "the feeling of entitlement to use the word is indeed offensive".
Hell's Basement co-founder Mike Patriquin apologized and said that they "acknowledge that we did not consider the commonplace use of the term huruhuru as a reference to pubic hair, and that consultation with a Māori representative would have been a better reference than online dictionaries." Hell's Basement also said they will change the name of the beer.
Personally, this is just my two cents, I think you can never go wrong if you use your own language or at least a language that you are 100 % familiar with and comfortable using because, as the greatest writer in the world (imo) once said: "There are a dozen inflections of the word sorry [in English] and only one of them means I’m sorry." But hey, what do I know? I was born in a country that has a thousand different words for 'fried pasta' but no word for 'accountability'. Weird, huh?
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Comments (5)
Here's another one. Where I come from, in Sesotho (Southern African language) the word 'tsubi' literally translates to 'penis'. So saying or reading Mitsubishi is always funny.
mi-*****-shi, oh man it does sound terrible
They meant well.
Oops
I love stories like this. The Chevy Nova ("no va"=won't go in Spanish) always sticks in my head, but even wordless packaging can be fraught with peril: think of the company who put smiling babies on the package of their baby food without knowing that African countries marketed food with pictures of what goes in the can. Oops.