January 2, 2018

Worst slogan of 2017 about sausage rolls

Filed under: Animals,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 4:08 pm

Slogan-cat

The winner of the worst business slogan of 2017 is De Korenbloem in Mill with ‘Van kop tot kont, worst in de mond’ (roughly, literally and figuratively, ‘From top [head] to bottom [arse], sausage in the mouth’, as in from beginning to end, sausage in your mouth. You get the idea and it sounds gross in Dutch as well.

Second place goes to ‘Voor iedere gleuf een doos’ (Moniss packing materials, Lelystad), which is ‘For every slit (possibly, tab), there’s a box’; ‘gleuf’ is slang for female genitalia and so is ‘box’. Third place is ‘Alles om uw poes mee te verwennen. Ook als u een kater heeft (‘Everything to pamper your pussy, even if you have a (male) cat.’) from 4 Cats. Yes, the image I snapped from the Amsterdam shop is Dunglish and there should be a space between ‘cat’ and ‘food’.

This was the sixth edition of the Dutch Bad Slogans Awards and if they are not disgusting, they are usually sexist or really bad puns, from head to arse.

(Link: www.sloganverkiezing.nl)

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December 11, 2017

Cheesiest slogans of 2017 up for vote

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 11:52 am
Kdag2010-2

Yes, 2016 had a real winner with ‘Zit je haircut’. Pronounce ‘hair’ in English and ‘cut’ (‘kut’) in Dutch, the latter being the word for what the Brits call the ‘c-bomb’, but in this case means ‘shitty’.

Here are some contenders for the ‘Worst Business Slogans of 2017’: ‘Voor iedere gleuf een doos’ (Moniss packing materials, Lelystad), which is ‘For every slit (possibly, tab), there’s a box’. The problem is that ‘gleuf’ is slang for female genitalia and so is ‘box’. For the advance students, it might remind you a bit of this song by Herman Brood. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s ‘Wees geen domme gans, steun de Dierenambulance!’ (Animal ambulance, Amsterdam), which translates as ‘Don’t be a silly goose, support the animal ambulance!’. It rhymes in Dutch and has a cheesy, family-friendly animal pun.

And there’s always the aural squinting, where you have to read one word in Dutch and one word in English to make the joke work that in fact doesn’t work at all. In that category, there’s ‘Haring is caring’, from the herring monger at camping Bakkum near Amsterdam. ‘Haring’ (herring) is then pronounced in Dutch ‘HA-ring’, which doesn’t rhyme with ‘caring’ in English. In fact, ‘Herring is caring’ would have been less fishy.

The winners will be announced later this week.

(Link: trouw.nl)

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December 13, 2016

Cheesiest business slogans of the year 2016

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:11 am
Kdag2010-2

Utrecht hair salon Local Heroes has won ‘the worst business slogan of 2016’ with ‘Zit je haircut’, a Dunglish joke that needs some unpacking. Pronounce ‘hair’ in English and ‘cut’ (‘kut’) in Dutch, the latter being the word for what the Brits call the ‘c-bomb’, but in this case means ‘shitty’. And so if your hair is looking shitty, come to their place, they’ll apparently fix it for you.

The second place went to a plumber in The Hague for ‘Your shit is my food’, as in ‘Your pooh is my daily bread’, but in a shitty, Dunglish, roundabout way, and third place was for a lingerie shop in Epe, Gelderland with ‘Tiet voor een goede bh’, which is trying to say ‘Time for a new bra’, but the word ‘tiet’ means ‘tit’ and is a play on the pronunciation of ‘time’ in Dutch. Women came up with that one, by the way.

Read about the worst business slogans 2015 with less pooh but more sexism.

And there’s always Dutch universities making a mess of it as well.

(Link: nu.nl)

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June 29, 2016

Dunglish fest on major Dutch online shop

Filed under: Technology by Orangemaster @ 10:54 am

It’s true that many non-Dutch people don’t buy from Dutch online shop Bol.com because their products are often more expensive than ‘that other website we all use’ and it’s all in Dutch. However, Bol.com is currently beta testing an English version of their site, which is a total Dunglish fest done using Microsoft, and so far it’s crap. Instead of hiring proper translators, Bol.com would rather be a laughing stock and insult its non-Dutch customers. I can’t wait for them to make a French version.

I barely got past the disclaimer: “Bol.com uses cookies (and similar techniques) to visit and shop at bol.com for you even easier and more personal. These cookies can we and third parties your internet behavior within and possibly outside our website. This allows us and third parties modify ads to your interests and you can share information through social media. By using this website, you go.” Using American English spelling and in other places British terms is a classic mistake as well.

– There’s a “Baby, Child & Mama” section, which sounds like a lost soul-funk number.
– “Products for every day: The sharpest drugstore and animal actions”. Ouch.

Go have a laugh. Remember they can’t be arsed to hire humans to do this, but I’m sure they have real staff for their programming, accounts and shipping. As they said themselves, “Please bear with us, we do not have it under the knee yet.”

(Link: www.entertainmentbusiness.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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December 7, 2015

Vote for the cheesiest business slogan of the year

Filed under: Fashion,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
Kdag2010-2

In November we had a bad university slogan festival, now it’s back to business with voting for the worst Dutch business slogans 2015. Last year’s winner roughly translates as ‘A carpenter hammers, a dentist drills… but we’re nicely located in Velsen-Noord’, which rhymes in Dutch, but that’s all it does. The 2013 winner, Jan De Cock uses “It’s De Cock that makes the man’ for his men’s clothing shop, which has actually worked for him rather than against him.

Dunglish seems to work wonders dumbing down slogans quicker than a scooter speeding over a bike path. A bakery boasts ‘Ik cake al naar je uit’, roughly ‘I’m caking (looking) forward to seeing you’, where cake and the Dutch ‘kijk’ (‘looking’) sound similar. My current favourites sans Dunglish is ‘Iedere paal gaat er in’ from a company that builds fences, which very roughly means ‘Every pole will go in’. A few of the contenders are straight up sexist but not funny in a 1970s kind of way, while some of them highlight excremental values.

The time to learn idiomatic Dutch is now.

(Link: www.hln.be)

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January 2, 2015

Dutch band Kane stops, many rejoice

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 2:52 pm

CD-rack

It didn’t take a million likes on Facebook to get the Dutch band Kane to stop producing music, only 17,000.

On December 27, the English-singing rock band from The Hague decided they had nothing more to say, which according to many pundits was the problem from the get-go back in 1998. “As someone who was on the Kane shit list earlier on and stayed on it permanently, I would like to say, ‘good fucking riddance’. […] Kane never wrote, I repeat, never wrote a single song that has any hint of staying power,” music columnist and friend Guuz Hoogaerts wrote recently on Facebook. Another friend in the music business, Marco Kalnenek, said that Kane’s Kane’s frontman, Dinand Woesthoff’s voice sounds fake and that his accent doesn’t help the music either.

The dislike of Kane can be compared to that of Canada’s Nickelback or Britain’s Coldplay: sappy, devoid of real emotion and uses clichés that sound like other music. If a radio station plays something often enough, the general consensus is that it must be good. To paraphrase famous Dutch band Doe Maar, ‘Hey, there’s a switch on your TV’, as in, if you don’t like it, turn it off.

Of course there are fans who were sad that the band stopped, like with any act. Personally, I’ve managed to ignore Nickelback (I can’t name a single song), but I know my co-blogger gets hives when he hears it. I get a rash when I hear Coldplay and I wouldn’t recognise Kane because I don’t listen to Dutch commercial radio.

Have a listen to Kane for yourself with ‘Shot of the Gun’. Why it’s not called ‘Gun shot’ I don’t know, but it has a Dunglish ring to it.

(Link: www.nu.nl, Photo: ‘CD rack for your Kane collection’, anonymous)

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August 27, 2014

Car rental video redefines the art of local advertising

Filed under: Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 1:33 pm

Diks

The Dutch don’t do local TV commercials, as most of them are either made nationally or dubbed from countries like France (you’ll notice everybody is white, shorter and has dark hair). There’s no tacky second-hand car salesman ads, with the exception of a bed and mattress chain that went rogue a few decades back.

Dutch car rental company Diks, a generic surname like Smith in Dutch, has gone rogue too and made their own commercial. It’s a short movie full of corny Dutch puns (great for learning Dutch catch phrases), the Diks family men showing off their resemblance and the ironic use of tits & ass, which works because it’s all in English. Much like swearing in a foreign language, T&A is also more socially acceptable and funnier in English, pointing a finger at pop culture. I praise the makers’ use of ethnic minorities and the disabled in positive roles, giving it a big city feel.

You can get away with T-shirts saying ‘Chicks like Diks’, as it is the name of the company, then there’s ignoring that line drawn in the Anglo-Saxon sand and going with ‘Our chicks clean your Diks’ (a bit Dunglishy, yes), as women on heels (!) wash some cars. I can get past that because it’s click bait, or maybe even chick bait.

Love the superman, the American football team, the normal-looking girls dancing around, and the ending. I foresee a run on those blue T-shirts as well.

(Link: www.froot.nl, Image: screenshot of video)

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May 3, 2013

Ex professor Diederik Stapel now pitches corporate Dunglish

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:02 pm

Dutch business magazine Quote has unveiled that the ‘professor’ who brought us piles of fake scientific research has become a language consultant. The nutty professor had a sales pitch on his website that has since been pulled, pitching him as, “being available as an opinionated consultant, motivator, coach, brand and identity language consultant, speaker, etc.”, and a whole bunch of other jargon-filled functions that show how narcissistic he really is, how crappy his Dutch is and how full of crap he still is.

He no longer has a Ph.D. as he was stripped of his title in 2011, but of course he has the right to go into business for himself. He has called his business Pile Consult. My comment is fair game for ridicule as he chose an English language name, not a Dutch one.

Just in case some of you don’t get it, Stapel, his last name, means Pile, as in a pile of things. Unfortunately, ‘pile’, or better yet ‘piles’ also refers to haemorrhoids. ‘Consultancy’ would also make more sense, but hey, we are dealing with a nut job. His ‘research’ was surely more akin to diarrhoea.

(Links: nederl.blogspot.nl, www.quotenet.nl)

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February 6, 2013

Dutch politicians’ English still good for a laugh

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 8:46 am

The English of Dutch politicians has always made for good laughing stock. In 2013 and in a globalised world, any politician needs to be able to speak decent English to be understood, and failing that, they should really have what they are going to say checked by someone who knows the language, as the media will be ready to pounce on them if they mess up.

Dunglish classics include former Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl saying ‘We are a nation of undertakers’ and former leader of the Dutch liberal party, Frits Bolkestein, calling economic prospects ‘golden showers’.

While in Congo yesterday Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Lilianne Ploumen said ‘There is no such thing as a Dutch product in terms of quality’, although she meant to say ‘There is nothing like a Dutch product.’ It’s one thing to say something wrong, but it’s a real job to actually say the opposite. Language training, anyone?

And yes, politicians from around the world surely screw up as well before y’all go off in the comments.

Here’s a funny Dunglish advert that shows you what Dunglish sounds like.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

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May 20, 2008

A Fokit condom in your keychain

Filed under: Gadgets,General by Orangemaster @ 9:22 am
fokit1.jpg

Yes, they mean ‘fuck it’, pronounced like a Dutch person, which sounds more like ‘fokit’. Again, the blunt Dutch approach, in this case, of always having a condom on you has a less than attractive Dunglish name, but sounds like a good idea. Business students of the Hogeschool Utrecht in Amersfoort came up with this in their first year to show off their business savvy.

“We talk a lot about sex,’’ says Jelle Okkerse (21). “The link with STDs was made very quickly since it is increasingly more of a problem with young people. We have so often not had a condom handy, which is why we came up with a trendy keychain, which can fit a condom.’’

(Link and photo: ad.nl)

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