Waterpik uses another name in Denmark. "Pik" is the common Danish word for male genitals. Most Danes can easily translate "water" to the danish word "vand". And "vandpik" is a term for the morning erection.
"And you put that thing in your mouth?!?!"
I'm just gonna start naming my projects by rolling my face on my keyboard, that way I won't have to be afraid of naming it something offensive in another language.
A naming pattern that I used for some time was to open the Wikipedia article of the thing that my program is about, and look in the sidebar for nice-sounding names for it in another language. It often ended up being something Scandinavian. For example, KDE's jigsaw puzzle game is called Palapeli (Finnish for "jigsaw puzzle") for this reason.
Oddly the name Dick is spelled and pronounced just like the slang term for a man's penis in the English language. You would think that would offend American puritanical sensibilities but the name is quite common.
In Holland there's a famous 90s detective show with a main character surnamed 'De Cock'. One of his 'catchphrases' is that upon being introduced to someone, he explicitly spells out C-O-C-K to them (because in Dutch the typical spelling is K-O-K), which means 'cook'.
Despite the fact that Dutch people are often fluent in English, and despite the fact that we even had a prime-minister with the name 'Kok', there's a surprisingly low number of jokes, in my opinion, involving this particular surname. I guess somehow the context switch from Dutch to English is big enough that it's just not all that funny.
Change the first letter to S and guess what you get in Turkish... It's far enough that it wouldn't be necessarily embarrassing to mention but interesting in the light of this knowledge.
Just thought of the Teledyne Waterpik brand. What did they ever do with that in Denmark? According to this FB post:
https://www.facebook.com/JstTht/posts/134568413284684?_fb_no...
Quote:
Waterpik uses another name in Denmark. "Pik" is the common Danish word for male genitals. Most Danes can easily translate "water" to the danish word "vand". And "vandpik" is a term for the morning erection. "And you put that thing in your mouth?!?!"