Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

Name:
Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Stiffs

There's a product called Model Magic Fusion by Crayola; it's a kind of modeling clay which comes in a number of colours, one of which is called Silver Crystal. Here's a picture of the American version.

The Canadian version, of course, has to have all the text in both English and French, and the name of the Silver Crystal version is, or clearly ought to be, Argent Cristalle. What do you suppose happens when you're an American company that doesn't bother to pay French proofreaders? I've given up trying to find a picture of the Canadian packaging, but you can take my word for it that what you get is a product mislabelled Agent Cristalle.

"Argent" is the French word for silver because the Latin word for it was "argentum", and this is why, in case you always wondered but didn't know, the chemical symbol for silver is "Ag". (The symbol for gold is "Au", from Latin "aurum", and the French word for gold is "or".)

+

The Consumerist has a link to an article about the pricing of movie popcorn, and both articles contained this very confusing sentence about why a medium bag of popcorn might get you more food than a large tub would:

The prospects of getting more popcorn in the medium than the large is higher here, since the medium is a bag with flexible sides and the tub has rigged sides.

I had to read it about three times. Rigged sides? The sides are rigged to...what? Explode?

Eventually I realized that the word that had been lunged at yet somehow missed was "rigid".

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Actually, assuming away the issue of free refills that generally come with a large purchase, the guy is right- while working in a theatre, I found that a packed medium bag can almost fill a large tub.

Monday, June 16, 2008 3:54:00 AM  

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