This writeup is about fast food.
I went by the dealer the other day to pick up my new car. They were like any other generic car dealer save for two small but important differences. One, of course, was the fact that there was a car inside, waiting for me and a couple of signatures. The other difference stood outside; a Mitsubishi Grandis station wagon.
You'd think the Japanese salarymen responsible for coming up with new and exciting names for cars had learnt a lesson after the hilarious Honda Fitta1 incident, but I guess the Japanese industry-wide software (MeaninglessCarNamesEndingInAs 2.7sr1 - or MCNEIA 2 for insiders) has been running with a corrupt or malfunctioning Scandinavian filter lately. The word on the street is that car names aren't supposed to mean anything or be offensive. Well, at least Mitsubishi Grandis isn't offensive.
Someone should go over there and tell them about Scandinavian slang and the way we lead and not lead our Nordic lives. I could offer my social anthropologist cousin to them for 0.000001% of their yearly profit, save them from any future embarrassment and be the next gaijin icon.
To be fair, the slang word grandis is probably only used in Norway. I'm going to cut to the chase here. Grandis is slang for Pizza Grandiosa.
So what?
Pizza Grandiosa isn't just a pizza. It's a whole culture on its own. It has its own slang word of course. Why shouldn't it? After all, eating it is almost as common as having sex (someone have probably done a study on that), and neither are subjects when you perform your daily neighbour across-the-fence chit chat.
Grandis.
Grandis - the ready made industrial Italian style pizza is the staple food on every student's menu, the preferred thing to eat when you don't really have the time to eat or is just too lazy to cook something. There are supposedly no demographical diversion among the grandis eaters. When you're hungry, lazy or pressed for time, you don't check with your demographic caste mark before stuffing your face. YMMV.
Norwegians don't have TV dinners for some reason, either because nobody got around to introduce them or because they flopped horribly. They just didn't catch on. What we got instead was the infamous Pizza Grandiosa. It happened in 1980, several million pizzas ago. Nobody admits to ever have eaten it, especially the self-appointed intellectual hooligan elite who takes every opportunity to write long rants on the inherent evilness of the cardboardish thing and the impending downfall of traditional Norwegian food. All the while their hideously expensive pasta machines runs at full steam in their deliciously decorated and posh urban kitchens.
I think it's because grandis doesn't become their carefully nurtured sideburns and FFL hairdos, but it could very well just be prejudice on my part.
I have eaten more grandis than I care to think about, and now Mitsubishi introduces a car called Grandis. The list of billions and billions of utterly stale jokes coming your way should you ever buy one of these cars is left as an exercise for the reader.
Poor Mitsubishi.
1 Honda Fitta? Imagine there one day being a car in your local, friendly showroom named Dodge Pussy. That's really all you need to know.