That's Fresh!

I began this blog by warning you that a Durian, by any other name, would still be an acquired taste. (see here)

Today, I saw a commercial on national TV that referred to another fruit, reminded me of the Durian reference and forced me to smile.

It's called Lemon Mobiles.

If you don't live in India, or don't watch enough TV, you can catch this masterpiece here

When I was in school, the poor lemon was a much maligned fruit. To be "sold a lemon" meant, in the English language, to be cheated into buying a defective product. (The irony of this definition is doubled when the guy in the ad - the fighter pilot who moonlights as a chauffeur on private corporate jets? - tells his girl that his Lemon Mobile is "bilkul zero defect, tumhari tarah! :-)

Ok, so maybe that's just the British usage. What about the others? I checked. Apparently, much of the US of A too considers the 'defective/substandard' connotation standard, especially with reference to used cars in that country.

Once again, 'Lemon' did not seem the best name for a product. (For crying out loud, even the luckless lemonade guys, whose hands are tied by the very product they have to sell, come up with names like 'LMN')

Then why? I decided to probe further; maybe there were other, more contemporary uses of the term that I was unaware of. There were indeed. Not one, but two.

Both were from pornographic literature; the first, to refer to a lesbian relationship and the second, to let readers of such material know, on the contents page itself, that the story marked 'Lemon' contained explicit descriptions of sex.

Sir, could I interest you in a lemon?

Could either of these be what the owner (malik?) of Lemon Mobiles was thinking about? Somehow, I doubt it.

So, my fishscreen conclusion is that the name is just one of those things that can happen when you work with a foreign language.

On the movie screen of my mind, I see the good man unveiling his idea to his managers with a flourish, "Ik Amrica da world famous Appal, ik sadda Lemon - dono THE best." ...and they say in unison "Hit hai ji, hit hai!"

We're not alone. Japan is replete with some of the best examples of this sort of aspirational faux pas. Check it out here