You Say "Lotion," I Say...

I bought this thing for the shower the other day, but I haven't installed it yet:

I'm planning to put the kids' shower gel, shampoo, and conditioner in the three compartments in order to alleviate both the crowded bottle situation and the waste when they invariably dump out a gallon of liquid goo onto the shower mat.

As you can see, nearly all of the text on the package appears in English, French, and Spanish. That's pretty typical, I think. But then I opened the package and took a look at the handy labels they provided:

Wh'appen? The "lotion" row got all messed up. The Spanish word loción appears in the French column (the French word for "lotion" is spelled the same as in English, lotion), and out of nowhere the Portuguese word loção shows up in the Spanish column! How weird is that? (It also looks like they used a circumflex over the "A" instead of a tilde.) I should volunteer my multilingual proofreading skills to the shower-dispenser industry.

Just as an aside, the French word for "shampoo"—le shampooing—always cracks me up, particularly because the French battle so ardently against Americanisms creeping into French (like le weekend).

Comments

[jo]

Possibly the French allow it because the term shampoo comes from the anglo-indian word champu.

[Karen]

Maybe so, but the "-ing" ending is the ultimate Americanism!

[Margaret]

Tildes are only over the letter n though, aren't they? (in Spanish anyway, not so sure about Portuguese) Le shampooing cracks me up too because they pronounce it with a nasal at the end, so it sounds nothing like the English word. Other ing words like le parking and le babysitting at least sound like English. Le sweat(shirt) is a weird one too because they pronounce it sweet.

[Karen]

Well, it's probably not called a tilde in Portuguese, but it does appear over vowels: http://tlt.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/portuguese.html

[scott]

I think what's even funnier is the idea that many products like this, which come with French documentation, aren't sold or marketed in France at all. The whole thing is sometimes an affectation to make Americans think the product is fancy.

[Karen]

You think? I always just assumed it was for French-speaking Americans, of which there are a surprising amount in New England, especially Maine -- they come down from Montreal. But we also have an enormous Brazilian community here in Boston, which is why I know a little Portuguese.

[Sheila]

Isn't it more likely done in order to comply with Canadian bilingual packaging laws? When I see English-French-Spanish, I assume that the producer wants one packaging design for the entire North American market.

[James]

What happened is that they put the extra Portuguese word in there because there was no need to put "LOTION" in there twice, so they had an extra space they could have filled with anything.

[James]

I also love 'shampooing' as a word, l'Academie Francaise needs to get a life. The oddest part was reading you call it an Americanism. We'd call it an Anglocisation! Hehehe. Oh, yeah, in case it's not clear, I'm a Brit. :)

[Liz]

I think French is for our French Canadians.

[Liz]

Oh, and how is the device working out? How high do you put it? I can imagine Nina in her bath pushing the little buttons over and over....

[Karen]

I talk about liking it here: http://verbatim.blogs.com/verbatim/2009/01/soap-opera.html. I don't have any bathers anymore, but I keep it about tummy-level for the kids when they're standing.