Thread: Весёлые картинки и другое смешное или не очень

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Originally Posted by strannik

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LOL!

The accidental joke isn't really translatable, but it's sort of analogous to this vintage advertisement:



(Петушки is the name of a town in the Moscow region, but the slang word петушки -- literally "small roosters" -- is more or less equivalent to US English "faggots." So Петушки голосуют за Путина! can be interpreted either as "The town of Petushki votes for Putin" or "Fags vote for Putin.")

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

LOL!

The accidental joke isn't really translatable, but it's sort of analogous to this vintage advertisement:



(Петушки is the name of a town in the Moscow region, but the slang word петушки -- literally "small roosters" -- is more or less equivalent to US English "faggots.")

I didn't know that.
What's funny in this picture?

Originally Posted by Marcus

I didn't know that.
What's funny in this picture?

This advertisement was from Britain in the very early 20th century. The slogan "Have you a little Fairy in your home?" was a play on words -- it meant either "Есть ли у вас дома немного мыла марки «Fairy»?" or "Есть ли у вас дома маленькая фея?"

However, in modern US English slang, "Have you a little fairy in your home?" would be understood as something like "Есть ли у вас дома маленький гомик?" ("Fairy" is a somewhat rude slang term for a male homosexual, but it's less rude than "fag".) And if I'm not mistaken, "гомик" is a rude word, but sounds mild in comparison with "пидор".

P.S. Even today, the "Fairy" brands of soaps/detergents are rarely sold in the US, because the name sounds Too Gay. But when I lived in Moscow in the early 1990s, you could buy imported British мыло для посуды under the trademark «Ultra-Fairy» Washing-Up Liquid. To American ears, this sounded incredibly hilarious -- something like "Ультра-Гомик"!

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

P.S. Even today, the "Fairy" brands of soaps/detergents are rarely sold in the US, because the name sounds Too Gay.

I just remembered a rather similar example...



"Одноразовые ватные тупферы" (English: "disposable cotton swabs") were first sold in the US -- beginning in the early 1920s -- under the trademark "Baby Gays", believe it or not!

Within a few years (sometime before 1930) the trademark was lengthened to "Q-Tips Baby Gays" (the "Q" stood for "quality"). By the end of the 1930s, the "Baby Gays" part had been dropped and the brand has been known to this day as "Q-Tips." (And in US English, "Q-tip" is widely used as a generic term for "одноразовый тупфер", just as "to Xerox" is often heard as a synonym for "to use a photocopying machine.")

However, "gay" in the sense of "homosexual" is most likely a neologism from (approximately) the WW2 era, and even then, it was very obscure slang that was heard only within the small гомосексуальное подполье of American cities like New York and San Francisco. And this slang sense probably remained completely unknown to most heterosexuals until, perhaps, the late 1960s.

In short, although the name "Baby Gays" sounds extremely funny today, it could not possibly have had the slightest bit of homosexual meaning back in the 1930s when the manufacturer of "Q-Tips Baby Gays" decided to change the product's brand-name. (I read somewhere that the name was actually changed because of a trademark lawsuit -- a much smaller company was already selling infant shoes under the trade-name "Gay Babies"! So, possibly, it was an example of a small business attempting to get some fast money by suing a larger and richer company for "infringement.")