There is no shortage of stories from Americans finding themselves in a humorous situation because of false cognates. For those that don't know, a false cognate are two words that are spelled the same in two languages, but mean two totally different things- like "burro" in Spanish means donkey, in Italian means butter. My favorite example story of this was one of my Peace Corps training friends who was explaining that with his healthy lifestyle he tried to avoid any food with "preservatives." When his Ukrainian host objected to his statement, he assumed that ultra-healthy cooking hadn't yet made it to her kitchen and he persisted. Going on, insisting that "preservatives were bad" etc., you get the point. A dictionary was finally pulled out to get them on the same page, to his surprise he learned that in Ukrainian. a preservative is a condom. Hilarity ensued. I am reminded of that story today in particular because of the photos I snapped at a vending machine recently. If you look closely, it seems that Ukrainian and Italian languages do have at least one similarity. However, it is not the similarity between preservative and preservativo that caught my eye. I still have some questions as to what they are claiming this product will do or not do for the user.
So clever!
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