Names Of The Week (5)
The marketeers of Hell’s Basement, a brewery in Canada, were scratching their collective heads t find a snappy name for a new beer they were about to launch. As it was supposed to be a light beer, some genius thought that they should call it a feather. Light as a feather, geddit?
As a name feather is a bit naff so to give the product some extra zing, they surfed the internet and came up with the Maori word Huruhuru, which, amongst other things, means “feather”. The problem is that amongst its other meanings and the one most commonly understood in the Maori vernacular, is “pubic hair”. Red faces all round.
Still, they are not the only ones to have fallen into the Huruhuru trap. A leather store in New Zealand, owned by Ercan Karakoch has also used the name for branding purposes.
Moral of the story; indiscriminate surfing and cultural appropriation can be fraught with dangers.
