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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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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November 14, 2015

Play bullshit bingo with Dutch university slogans

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:45 pm

The Platform for the Reform of Dutch Universities (H.NU) lets all of us vote on the ‘stupidity ranking 2016’ with Dutch university slogans. Amusingly, the voting is in Dutch, but there’s enough Dunglish and misused English that many of you can join in. It’s three points for the dumbest slogan, then two points, then one point. The platform has also included the local parody version of some of them, which makes it even more fun.

The problem with these slogans, which resemble useless city marketing ones, is that they don’t relate to education. They’re too vague, trying too hard to sound like American or British universities or trying too hard altogether. One sticks out above the rest in our view, it’s the RUG with ‘Born Leaders Reach For Infinity’ that has the flow of an acronym, but the appeal of an overflowing bin bag with rotten food begging to be taken out.

(Link: platform)

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