A few months ago, an ad appeared in Stockholm metro stations from Elixir Pharma touting their new vaginal-health supplement. It promptly disappeared again, along with the word play it used involving the C-word. Not everyone laughed at the word play, but rather found it offensive. It was reported to the Reklamombudsman, or Swedish Advertising Ombudsman, and ultimately pulled.
Hanna Myrling, head of marketing at Elixir Pharma, told Resumé magazine that the goal was to start a conversation about women’s health and to do it with a bit of humor. (Link to the article in Swedish here.) One may argue that the goal has been reached: we’re discussing right here, aren’t we? But most of the coverage I have seen has centered on the decision to include the C-word, not, in fact, on women’s health. So what happened?
I see two issues at play here. One has to do with language itself. Myrling was not wrong to test something out. Humor can disarm, as she claims, and inspire a conversation. The meaning of words and how we use them indeed evolves. Consider the common use of “literally” in English. Who has ever “literally died laughing”? How many times has it really happened when I’ve told my kids, “All this noise is literally going to make my head explode”? Elixir Pharma took a chance in trying to use humor to shift how we use the C-word just a little bit.
Then the other issue gets in the way. It has to do not with what words mean, but how they feel. Anyone who speaks more than one language will understand this if they think about it for just a moment. Try singing a traditional song from your native language in translation. Try being properly angry in your second language. Try suddenly switching the language you speak with your intimate partner. No matter your level of fluency and despite your “success” in being able to do any of those things, they very likely won’t feel the same.
Culture is the norms, values, traditions, etc which form us and influence our way of being without our being conscious of it. An American and a North Macedonian may have very different emotions attached to the word “communism”, for example. I know, because I was raised in America to intrinsically know that Communism is bad. My college classmate, raised in North Macedonia, misses that era and the fairness he associates with it. Same language, same word, completely different understanding.
Which brings us back to Elixir Pharma’s ad. While it used clever word play and plenty of people would get the joke and let it go at that, it included English copy, which automatically speaks to a different audience than a strictly Swedish-language ad. Every language has words you don’t say. Whether they be legally banned (such as “Sieg Heil” in Germany) or just taboo, like the N-word or C-word in the United States. For anyone with the accompanying cultural background, reading one of those words in full, especially in public, can feel like a gut punch. Their significance goes far beyond the dictionary definition.
While we rarely encounter such egregious examples as this, they serve to prove the point that we cannot assume everyone understands things the same way we do, especially not today, when our lives intertwine with not just our village, but the global village. Let’s be aware of culture and thoughtful with our language in order to reach our actual goals and not become famous for our failures.
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