More Hortifruti Word-Play
Do you remember all those great adverts that Hortifruti were running a while back? They put fruit and vegetables into famous film posters using excellent word play skills. Edward Scissor Hands (Edward Mãos de Tesoura) became Edward Mãos de Cenoura, Moulin Rouge became Melão Rouge (melon) and Shrek became ChuChuRek (chuchu) – take a look at my post about it to see the brilliant film-poster adverts.
Regular readers will know I have a weakness for the art-form (yes, art-form) of the pun, but whoever worked on that advertising campaign was a genius. And isn’t it nice when smart adverts are created for a product you really like? Hortifruti is easily my favourite food store in Rio – if you’re looking for fresh fruit and vegetables and a great selection of other really high quality ingredients, Hortifruti (OR-tchee FROO-tchee) is the place to go.
After their last campaign (fruit/veg transformed into super-heroes) things have been quiet for a while. And then look what I saw this morning!
Not a very good image as I took this on my phone in the subway and the poster was backlit very unevenly… Still, you get the picture right?
OK, if you have already seen all the different aspects of this piece of word-wizardry, please sit quietly (smugly) while the rest of us break this down:
The fruit we’re looking at is our old friend Lima da Persia. Persia (modern day Iran) is part of Arabia and so they have dressed the lima up as that famous Arabian character Ali Baba. Not very remarkable yet. When my eyes scanned the main text (Ali Babava por mim) I thought “OK fine, another reference to Ali Baba”. It was only later that I looked it up and found that Babava is the portuguese for drooled! So our juicy Lima da Persia is telling us that Ali drooled over her.
I guess this kind of trick doesn’t sound so great when you have to break it down and explain it, but still, it was nicely done right? I wonder what they’ll come up with next!
This particular word play requires knowledge in Portuguese, Geography. History and Literature. Glad to see that someone still has decent standards: good job Hortifruti (maybe I’ll give you a Grittjoke to be used in a future campaign).
It looks like Iranian is quite up there when it comes to the Indo-European family tree. The one both English and Portuguese derive from.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg/2000px-IndoEuropeanTree.svg.png
Wow – nice link Gritty. Aren’t languages fascinating!
And, erm, yeah you should definitely get in touch with Hortifruti – send them some of your best Grittjokes. The job’s in the (shopping) bag… ;)
I am now wondering if a similar tree exists for computer language/code. So far I only found the link below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree
It seem to denote the internal workings of a language/code; yet I want a tree which informs what language/code is the root for subsequent one: like Latin is the root for Portuguese, or marmite for Satan :-)
I found an unhandled compiler error – you should debug your comment and remove all negative references to Marmite. That’s my advice as a seasoned IT professional :)
If you’re into this kind of thing (I’m not going to admit to it myself), then this is pretty close to what you’re describing.
That is exactly what I was looking for: thank you.
Amazing how you came across it while getting your regular Premier League updates . . .
Mmm, Ali Babava por Mim. I guess many parents do such word plays for kids. Alt least MY daddy did it. My kids do not get much of it when he says such things in order to make them eat everything up. They are not very fluent in Portuguese, I guess. ***SAD.***
Aw – that is sad. But maybe not that sad – I’ve noticed that people who aren’t fluent in a language often develop more of a love/appreciation of a language. My wife often remarks how much she likes it that in English, almost any word can become a verb – like when I said “Shall I spoon some [food] onto your plate?”
And there’s plenty of time to learn right? At least I hope so or my Portuguese lessons are a bit waste of time/money! :)