English Naming Failure, Fresca, Pepsi, and Schweppes say hello.

What a lovely calendar.



What a not-so-lovely name.

Gord, I see chinese characters at the bottom left, can u take a pic of that? The "Wang" part of the name might be a Chinese last name, it's quite common.

I agree that's probably a family name. Rather, it's just one of those family names that shouldn't have been used in the name when pimping out how they teach English. Particularly since the trade name the academy is "GnB".


Bonus material: http://www.eduwang.com/ If you click on the site with SP2 installed, IE goes ape-shit insane reloading over and over. It is indeed the site of a thousand popups that reload if they are blocked.

教育 => Education

産業 => Industry

大賞 => Great Prize

教育産業大賞 => Great Prize of Education and Industry.

In the bottom left they claim to have won an award from the "Korea Educational Brand Awards". I have no idea who they are. This particular academy doesn't do Chinese but rather English, Science, Korean and Math. Perhaps they offer Chinese resources to larger franchises who wish to teach Chinese which is why they slapped Chinese on it. It's pretty rare to have Chinese on promotional material otherwise.

there's a comedian who smashes watermelons with a mallet as part of his stage act. Before he gets to smashing watermelons, he often make jokes about how the language is structured. One of his performances has a whole thing on the PC company called Wang.

Apparently Wang at some point was traded on the American stock market. He said that it must be extraordinarily embarrassing for people on Wall Street everyday to have to say things such as "Wang is up" and "Wang is down".

got to wonder why nobody ever tells foreign speaking people what these things mean in American: although maybe they did tell the company, and the end result was the idea in the first place ;-)

The comedian's name is Gallagher and Wang Laboratories was named for its founder, Dr. An Wang. Apparently, the name Wang did little to discourage business, as the company dominated the word processing business and helped bring about the decline of the typewriter in corporate environments. However, the company did not acknowledge the rise of the PC (they made some PCs models, but were still focused on word processing), which in turn brought about the decline of the dedicated word processor.

It's not just the occasional East Asian name that sounds like something dirty in American English. My last name is Condon, which holds a strong resemblance to a form of birth control...

On the other hand, I never feel guilty using dirty sounding fake Asian names on some online forms.

My favorites:
Suk mai Dek
Misu Horani
Hai Hung Wang
Tai Mai Shu (not dirty, but kinda funny)
Mai Ding Cum

I'll just end it here...

Late last year the government of South Korea decided to introduce a pure Korean word to replace the English loan word "condom" in Korean. They decided to mix a couple Chinese words (love and necessity) into "Ae-Pil".

But after several people came forward who were named "Ae-Pil" in protest against their beautiful name being used. So the proposal was abadoned.

North Korea refuses to use any English loan words in their official Korean. I'll see if I can find out what word they use.

Huge update:

"Wang" is king in Korean. The domain name is suppose to be "Edu King".

Courtesy of HyoSuk.

Wang = 王 = King
It is also the most common name in China, along with Zhang, Li (or Lee, I), Zhao and Liu.

I think in the past, lots of kanji was used in Korea? I think I saw this in a TV show somewhere. But it does seem weird to have Chinese on a modern calendar/ad.

EduKING somes infinitely better than eduWANG.

Stephen King also used to make jokes about his first word processor AKA 'His Big Ol' Wang'... It's in the first chapter of 'Danse Macabre' if I remember right...

Of course, the best Asian name is Hung Lo.

Stephen King also used to make jokes about his first word processor AKA 'His Big Ol' Wang'... It's in the first chapter of 'Danse Macabre' if I remember right...

the only Stephen King book that I don't own, it figures......

Now I have a reason to buy it :-)

I can't believe nobody has mentioned the obligatory Penny-Arcade reference.

"EduWang Inc. has serious growth potential."

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all night. Try the veal!

Well, it's non-fiction. Think On Writing 20 years eariler....

I liked it better than many of his novels, but I'm a freak.

I don't know, Wang isn't so bad. I work at a company that has a membership of close to 10,000 people and some of the names that come through are definitely worse than Wang. One gentleman in particular has the name Phuc Do, there were some problems with his application and there was a lot of calling back and forth to speak with him. I tried to ask for Mr. Do but the receptionist informed me there were 3 of them. I tried to ask for 'Fook' and the receptionist corrected me with her small and cute asian accent. It really is pronounced fuck.

There is another whose name is Young Ho Shim, he always places his last name first in all correspondence. Shim Young Ho, not really. Another placed her full name on her application and there really was no need but a good laugh for our office. Audrey Eda Dick. My favorite everytime I see his name on reports is Pho, Bick.

This ends my addition to the funny names section.

Funny, yes. However, the correct pronounciation of those names hardly sounded vulgar or so.

In chinese, Wang is pronounced as "W-ang", where the "an" is same as "un" in uncle. Sorry, but I heard people (non-chinese) pronouncing it as "whank" all the time.

Speaking of loan words, interesting semi-relevant tidbit here:

There is no word for "leadership" in french. Coincidence?