GIP

Found this among someone else's icons and decided to gack it, since it amused me so :)

The things you learn: loperamide

Loperamid, a medical substance used in Germany to treat diarrhoea, is an opioid. Whee! (But one that acts only in the intestines, which also have the appropriate receptors, and not in the brain.)

Lost in Translation

I was just reading the German Wikipedia article on "Übersetzungsfalle" (translation pitfall) and had to snerk about the the section "Beabsichtigte, scherzhafte Übersetzungsfehler" (intentional, humorous translation mistakes):

• "Garibaldi, Italian for pressure cooker" (from "gari-baldi", i.e. "das Essen ist bald gar")
• "Mubarak, Arabic for cowshed" (from "Muh-Baracke")
• "Fidel Castro, Spanish for violin case" (from "Fiedel-Kasten")

*snerk*

How not to make a good impression on "international" customers

...by not translating things properly.

In this case, it was an image in an email newsletter from Kodak, advertising Ofoto greeting cards with photographs. The email contained the following image showing how easy it is to get at your greeting cards:

Unfortunately, the text in the third box (with caption “Write a personal note”) is spelled wrong—I suppose they were going for „Fröhliches…“ (“Happy…”, “Merry…”), though I'd probably write either „Frohes (Neues Jahr/Fest)“ or „Fröhliche (Weihnachten)“ at this time of the year, so I'm not quite sure what word they thought would go behind that: „Fröhliches Neues Jahr“ sounds unidiomatic to me.

So they just made themselves look silly and unprofessional (IMO) for including such a bad translation in the image.

Prayer lists

Hmm… reading this entry made me glad that prayer lists in LDS temples aren't like that; the names and reasons aren't announced to the people who pray, which basically removes the ability to gossip. Though I can imagine some people might object and say that praying for a list of people whose names you don't know beyond "the names on strips of paper inside this closed pouch" might not be very sincere.

Shibboleths

[Poll #383269]

Standard Disclaimer

Mostly for my own amusement—the so-called "standard disclaimer", possibly from this Usenet post from 1991:

( Longish disclaimer )

You may also be interested in this list of 317 disclaimers, sorted by length. Also, googling for some of the phrases will find numerous sites on the web with similar ones, typically embellished with assorted additions of their own.