As I understand the translation of Chinese for Coca Cola — it loosely means delicious happiness. (One of the words for delicious in Mandarin is: kekou — the first word, Coca) Quite amazing for something so American to be able to have a phonetic translation into Chinese that actually means something — AND something that relates to the product as well — not an easy feat in Chinese!

Regarding the book/cool transmorgification (thank you, Calvin), I came across something similar recently. When posting a comment for an internet video of a skate boarder doing a face plant, one might exclaim "Owned!" If that's not bad enough, an apparent misspelling of Owned has become popular. With the letter O being so close to P on most keyboards, people occasionaly respond "Pwned!" And it has not become intentional.

I think seeing this spelling and usage is more painful than the face plant. I've used computers and the internet since the dawn of personal computers, and I have no patience for these internet word entities. While I may sometimes laugh out loud, I will never lol.

By the way, the math required to post this message asks me what is the sum of 3 + 1. Shouldn't that be what is the sum of 3 AND 1?

I laughed when I heard the word biffy. In the late forties, anyone who attended Camp Wathana (near Detroit, Michigan) would recognize that word. One of the first thing campers learned was that the facilities were called the biffy. I thought that was a term made up by the camp director.

Predictive texting often leads to… textonyms. Now there's a lovely word for you. (Google hits: 892.)

The rumored nonsensical translation for "Coca-Cola" is "????":

"?" means "tadpole," and repeating a word for an animal twice is typical kiddy talk, so that makes "??" more like "taddypole";

"?" is "to bite"; and "?" is "wax."

So it's actually the tadpole who bites the wax, not the drinker.

Still nonsensical, but it's at least a more accurate translation.

The Chinese Wikipedia (far less credible than the English Wikipedia) entry for "Cola-Cola" still maintains that the initial official translation of the brand name is "Taddypole Bites Wax," which also seems to be a popular Chinese urban myth, but I doubt if that ever really occurred. Years (probably decades) before Cola Cola entered the Mainland Chinese market, it already set up official distributions in other Chinese language markets, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, and had had uniform brand name translation for years, same as the one currently in use. It's a very pleasant name, which I understand to mean "delicious and makes you happy"; the "makes you happy" part comes from the phono-based translation of "cola" and has become the Chinese word (I believe it's universal in all Chinese language communities) for "coke" (the beverage only). The success with the name also dictated how Pepsi translated its own, which could be loosely translated as "Everything Would Be a Happy Thing."

Aside from disbelieving any company would give up on a perfectly fine and already culturally powerful name to create another, I also doubt if a company as well structured and image-conscious as Coca Cola would allow any regional distributor to get creative with any part of the product image (and the brand name no less), and I just can't find any picture of any actual Coca Cola artifact bearing that name, so my take is better take it as a joke.