Consumo, consumir. Capitalismo salvaje y neo capitalismo ¿salvaje?
Proprietary names Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola led to the generic noun cola, first recorded in the late 1880s, for any sweet, brown, carbonated, caffeinated, non-alcoholic drink flavoured with kola nuts or similar.
Coca-Cola’s global spread meant translation. While almost all languages adopted an identical pronunciation, this did not work when the drink first entered the Chinese market, in 1928.
Characters used by local retailers to render a close approximation of the pronunciation resulted in phrases of nonsensical semantics, including “bite the wax tadpole”.
The company’s brand translation success story finally happened with kěkǒu kělè in Mandarin (hó lohk in Cantonese) – happiness you can taste.
