So it's really more about unfortunate translations as opposed to unfortunate names. However, I remember a diet product in the 1970s called Ayds (it was a small caramel candy, supposed to be an appetite suppressant but undoubtedly just diet-industry snake oil). Anyway, it was quite popular until the mid-1980s, when AIDS came to mean something completely different. Overnight, the brand disappeared!
They're not translations. They're just English (or not) words used in a weird way. I could buy Barf detergent at a local Persian-run supermarket. But I never have.
My mother made us enablers. In the pre-Ayds days she made me go pick up a little plastic tin of multi-colored diet pills (aka speed) from her "doctor" a few blocks away. But then, as kids we also had to go buy cigarettes for her, either at the corner store or at the apartment house across the street from us, which had both a milk machine (took a quarter and two pennies for a quart) and a cigarette machine in the lobby.
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So it's really more about unfortunate translations as opposed to unfortunate names. However, I remember a diet product in the 1970s called Ayds (it was a small caramel candy, supposed to be an appetite suppressant but undoubtedly just diet-industry snake oil). Anyway, it was quite popular until the mid-1980s, when AIDS came to mean something completely different. Overnight, the brand disappeared!
I remember that brand. I think my mother tried it back in the '50s. I hadn't thought of that in many a year.
They're not translations. They're just English (or not) words used in a weird way. I could buy Barf detergent at a local Persian-run supermarket. But I never have.
I wouldn't, either.
I remember Ayds too.
My mother made us enablers. In the pre-Ayds days she made me go pick up a little plastic tin of multi-colored diet pills (aka speed) from her "doctor" a few blocks away. But then, as kids we also had to go buy cigarettes for her, either at the corner store or at the apartment house across the street from us, which had both a milk machine (took a quarter and two pennies for a quart) and a cigarette machine in the lobby.
I miss the old days.
Jeff
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