# 50: Bite the Wax Tadpole
20 Points (On 1 of 9 lists)
Highest Vote: (#6 by Tripe )
The Story:Dude, can you get me a soda?
No, not a pop. Where the hell are you from? Look, just get me the tadpole.
What's a tadpole? You don't know?
You know how when you take a product and introduce it to a foreign market, they sometimes change the name to make it more acceptable to them?
...
No, not like a Royale with Cheese. Geez.
Well, sometimes they don't do this and just stick with the normal name. Well, there's this big company who normally does that and most of the time it works out okay. But when they expanded to China, they screwed up. See, when you say "Coca Cola" in Mandarin, well, it's translates to "Bite the Wax Tadpole." Oddly enough the Chinese weren't interested in consuming paraffin amphibians, so it bombed there. gotta do the research there, man.
Well, Is It True?Well, no.
While those sounds can be interpreted as "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse fastened with wax", there are roughly 200 different characters that make that sound. So they can also mean "furble fabble fibble foo." Or something like that.
Plus, Coke was aware of the name issue before they started exporting to China (in 1928) and the characters used for the name actually mean something close to "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice." And that would be the real thing.
Random Notes A frightening number of bands have songs titled "Bite the Wax tadpole" including L7, tub ring and Super 8 Bit Brothers. None of them are particularly good.
And the Nova? No, that's not a real story either.
Up Next This was either the fault of Bender or the Ferengi.