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Reality is all about doing ality over and over again.

—Abraham Piper

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

Sometimes you wonder what they were thinking when they named a thing. Take the pineapple. If ever there was an object that was less like pine and less like an apple, and in nearly every respect, this surely must be it. Or grapefruit. I don’t know about you, but if someone handed me an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, sour, and the size of a cannonball, I don’t believe I would say, “Well, it’s rather like a grape, isn’t it?”

—Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself (Broadway Books: 1999), p. 267.

Notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California…. Care should be exercised near open flame.

Our words for unhealthy contamination—“soiled” or “dirty”—suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we’d all head straight into therapy.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 10.