Still? You sure?

Well, the holiday season has come to a close. My family finished it off by spending the weekend in Modi'in, for our good friend's Bat Mitzva. (Congratulations, Hadas!) It was a lot of fun, and we even found a funny label. Or so we thought...

Here's a bottle of juice that was served. It's a new trend - "clear" juice - in other words, not enough fruit to get pulp or clouds in your drink. Quite yummy and refreshing, actually. Anyway, here's a picture of the bottle:

If you look closer, you'll notice a claim on the front:


Aha, less sugar than what? They don't just give that information away easily - this is a high class bottle, with footnotes. But before we get to the footnote, here's the other funny part: what's with the "approximately 37%?" Is 37% not precise enough? Wow - these guys seem to have had a hard time holding back on the decimals.

Anyway, here's the footnote, which we all thought was funny when we saw it. Approx 37% less sugar...

Still drinks! How funny!

This is their translation of the Hebrew "mashkeh kal," which literally means "light drinks." I was fairly certain that light drinks are called such because they're non-alcoholic. I've personally made the occasional mistake of grabbing one when looking for a diet drink, although there's no connection between this light and that light. Anyway, there were around 20 of us in the room when we saw this, and no one I spoke to seemed to think that "still" was an appropriate term for a drink. I figured that they were referring to it's lack of carbonation, but even so, what a silly mistranslation!

Until tonight, when we chanced to looked it up online, and found that definition number six for still, according to some, is:

Not carbonated; lacking effervescence: a still wine.

Seems obscure? Wait, there's more! Although "still drink" doesn't get its own wikipedia or answers.com page, this appears on the wikipedia page for nectar:

The classification of drinks with fruit flavour typically denominate 'Juice' as 100% fruit juice with no additives (although juice can be reconstituted from concentrate diluted with water), 'Nectar as 25%-99% fruit juice and 'Still drinks' as less than 25% fruit juice.

Wow! So it turns out that, in the world of fruit drinks, "still drinks" is actually the formal term for not enough fruit to get pulp or clouds in your drink. The Israeli Prigat company has taught us a proper English word! I'm a bit stunned. Does this mark the beginning of a new and wonderful era? Does this make up for "biulding meterials" and "parkink?" I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

A new way to do it

You may recall that my dear brother Benjy came to visit Israel last year, and snapped a bunch of funny photos that I've been slowly posting. Well, we've come to the last one in this series, and soon I'll post what he's been finding in LA.

Here we go:


Now, the fact is, the English here (overall) is pretty good. There's the one obvious mistake that they conveniently highlighted for us in red, but aside from that, not bad. The funny thing to me is that it's not a direct translation. The gist is the same, but it seems that whoever translated into English also decided that really, the Hebrew version was much too wordy, and so decided to cut out most of the fluff. Even if you're not fluent in Hebrew, you can see that there are far less words in English than in Hebrew, and in a direct translation, the opposite tends to be true.

Also, they seemingly gave up on translating the little haimish! in the bottom corner, which means "warm and comfortable; homey; folksy" according to answers.com. Peculiar, maybe the translator knew only Hebrew, and not any Yiddish? Or maybe that, too, was edited out.

Anyway, shirts done like a home would be nice to see! Maybe I'll give them a call. Thanks, Benjy!

A Sign of the New Year

Things have been a bit crazy, with all of these holidays whipping about. I just wanted to post this seasonal photo, before it's out of season.

This is what shopping in the produce section of any Israeli supermarket looks like just before the New Year. Everyone's anxious to try a "new fruit" for the new year, which seems like a nice enough idea. Then one actually goes shopping, and finds that our generally mild-mannered grocery stores have become landing pads for an annual extra-terrestrial invasion.

Happy New Year, everybody!