None of us are immune to the occasional slip of the tongue, but if you’re a Hong Kong celebrity or politician, your slip-up may end up on a Snickers ad.
Around a week ago, the chocolate bar company unveiled their new local ad campaign, which features six different verbal mistakes made by famous figures, from Chinglish spoken by legislators to a historical gaffe on a television show.
These blunders are labeled with the tagline “hungry quotations,” suggesting that they were supposedly uttered on an empty stomach.
“People make silly mistakes and do the wrong thing when they are hungry,” Doreen Cheng, the marketing director of MARS Hong Kong, told Marketing magazine.
“We want to bring back those familiar faults done by famous people and tell the audience that famous ‘slip-ups’ and mistakes are due to being hungry.”
The quotes are also accompanied by a Chinese tagline: “Do nine out of ten things incorrectly, all because of an empty stomach?!” (We promise it sounds better in Chinese).
The typo for “gwai” changes the question from “May I have your surname, Mr. Chan?” to “Expensive surname, Mr. Chan?”
Notable examples include legislator Chung Shu-kun’s infamous “Same on you” diatribe against Jay Walder, the former CEO of MTR Corporation who was heavily criticized for the cross-border rail project delay, as well as legislator Chan Hak-kan’s possible Freudian slip during a 2008 interview, in which he promised he would “try my breast.”
See if you can recognize the rest of the mistakes in the ads below!
Would it make sense for a character in a drama set in Ancient China to use the word “check?”
“To protect the core value is the core of the core value.”
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