http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34975365

The link above is a short article on names for non-English brands that have a different resonance in English ears. Such as...

...“Spunk”, a new sportswear brand backed by Futurebrands in India & launched with great fanfare earlier this year by Saif Ali Khan, one of India’s leading Bollywood actors.

There is clearly a good deal of money riding on this new brand. Indeed, companies like Futurebrands can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to find a funky new brand-name that will seed the right sort of ideas in the minds of the buying public to cause them to take it into  their, er, hearts.

So, ‘spunk’, which the Oxford English Dictionary tells us means “courageous and plucky”. And in Australia is slang for ‘an attractive person’. Unfortunately, the OED also tells us that the first recorded use of it’s current, ubiquitous British-slang meaning for ‘semen’ was in 1890.

Whoops-a-Daisy.

Here’s a few more:-

• Fanny
  a Vietnamese manufacturer of ice-cream
• Pschitt lemonade
  (French soda, created by Perrier)
• Bonka coffee
  (from Nestlé; popular in Spain)
• PLOPP chocolate
  (manufactured by Swedish company Cloetta)
• Only Pukeet
  (Chinese; translates as ‘Honey Bean Crisps’)
• Pee Cola
  (manufactured in Ghana & means ‘very good cola’)
• SHITTO sauce
  (also Ghana; spiced pepper sauce)
• Krapp (toilet paper); Bums (biscuit)
  (both Swedish)
• Barf detergent
  (from Iran; Persian: برف [bærf], meaning ‘snow’)

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Alex Kemp