Fire and Knowledge

In Chinese, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s slogan, “finger-lickin’ good,” came out as “eat your fingers off.”

Ford executives spent a long time scratching their heads trying to figure out why the Pinto was a complete flop in Brazil. Then someone told them that pinto was Brazilian slang for “tiny male genitals.”

And the folks at Gerber didn’t know that because of high illiteracy rates in some African countries, pictures on the outside of packages are always representative of what’s inside. No surprise, then, that customers were more than a little repelled by that cute baby on the baby food labels.

—Mark Breier, The 10-Second Internet Manager, p. 118