Can you guess what is being advertised in this Russian ad? If you are a Russian speaker, don’t spoil the fun for everybody else.
The good news is that the ad was pulled because it was recognized to be offensive. This is a great step forward for Russia where ads are notoriously icky.
Ooh ooh me first! Is he a dentist?
Either that or it’s a club for erotica where you also get something to eat while you shag.
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My readers are too smart. Yes, this is an ad for a dentist. It was pulled down for false advertisement and being offensive. 🙂
What’s the point of making up riddles if people guess immediately? 🙂
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I thought dentist too, but possibly that’s a bit obvious so now I am thinking plastic surgeon.
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A little of both; implant dentistry.
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Yeah, I was going to guess dentist too. But in the interest of guessing something else, perhaps its just something for medical stuff in general? (Why is it that all our guesses are medical-related? I feel like that is telling – like, it’s OK for doctors to violate us or something. But try as I might, I couldn’t come up with something that wasn’t medical)
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In the interest of variety (because my first thought was dentist too), I’m going to go with spa resort; maybe he’s giving her a facial or something…
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It’s remarkably similar to the one for Clinica Dental in this list of logo screw-ups.
For the Russian version, I think it depicts a man standing behind a sheet of that corrugated transparent plastic (here viewed in cross-section) used to cover vulnerable plants. He’s watering a flower. In the distance, you can see a kid’s slide.
It’s an advert for a park.
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Or it could be a warning sign: Do not get too close to the Van de Graaff Generator.
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I’m puzzled by the slogan. Is that a normal verb used with ‘guarantee’ is does the v in the beginning make it a double entendre somehow?
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Jesus, you folks are scaring me with your intelligence. 🙂 Yes, this is supposed to be a pretty dirty joke that I can’t even translate in a way that will do it justice. The ad was accused of false advertisement because it tuned out that there was no actual guarantee offered by the dental clinic. The word was used to enhance the double entendre.
I have very very intellectual readers.
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I was about to post this on your most recent page promotion post, but then you posted this almost-on-topic post, so I figures, why not? Needless to say, the engrish.com phenomenon works both ways. The page reproduced at the second linked site is from Alexander Lipson’s “A Russian Course,” which was the textbook that introduced me to that baroque language, so I suppose I’m among the inostransies they’re ridiculing. To my dubious credit, I was among the students who petitioned UM’s Russian department to try a different textbook on the grounds that the late Alexander Lipson was filling our heads with conversationally irrelevant vocabulary, under the assumption that knowing the Russian word for, say “concrete mixer” does not contribute to the goal of near-term fluency, which I’ve later learned isn’t a thing anyway. The joke may be on us. Years later, I have come to suspect that the corny humor is itself a learning aid, as well as memorizable repetition of certain idiomatic points, such as the “на каком языке” construct.
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Before seeing what others said, or running for a dictionary, I would say a dental clinic. Now let me check the dictionary.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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