Uneeda Pun

I hate smudgy eyeglasses.  Clean them by running them under hot water a long time (the optician says it can't deform the lenses), no scrubbing,  and wipe with clean cloth (diapers once perfect for this.)  But I found a tiny bottle of eyeglass cleaner in the back of the medicine cabinet that must have been a free sample.  The name of this fine (I tried it) product is "OptiMist."  This is beautiful.  You are an optimist if you see the future as good; your opti-aids are made to see well with a misting  of cleanser.  The two "opti"s have entirely different roots.

I love this kind of delicate beauty in brand names and slogans, unnecessary and probably unnoticed by many users.  It was the kind of thing that entranced me as a child.  I may have written here about my delight in the Mortons salt box when I was young:  the salt had some sort of additive that kept it from clumping in humid weather, and on the box was a pretty girl my age, with the box under her arm -- it had opened somehow and spilled a cascade of salt behind her that she didn't notice.  Slanting lines representing falling rain came toward her open umbrella, and (in the older versions, I seem to remember this) made circles in the puddles at her feet.  The slogan written beside her was, as of course you know, "When It Rains, It Pours."  I pondered this at length, tickled by the way the "it" had two different meanings.  I was a little in love with the insouciant girl.

Cruder but hilarious in its crudity was the name of a brand of crackers we didn't buy, that I saw only at the market:  Uneeda, a word resembling popular American Indian names for food products (e.g. Oneida), but revealing its actual source when coupled with the name of the food:  Uneeda Biscuit.  

There were lots of these -- I think fewer now, though maybe Internet startups like them.  Anybody remember others?