A common problem marketers and product developers face in naming their products, is the meaning or connotations of their product name in different languages.

My hometown of Astoria, Oregon has a large Finnish population. Try as they would, salesmen for the Bosco company simply could not sell their chocolate-flavoured syrup there, no matter what promotions or enticements they offered. Why? Because "Bosco" is remarkably similiar to the Finnish word for "shit".

No matter how tasty or cheap Bosco might be, no self-respecting Finnish housewife was going to serve her husband and children anything labeled shit.