Unusual Euphemism / Advertising

• An advert in the 1990s for the health drink Horlicks once had its participants exclaim 'horlicks!' when something went wrong.
  • This is a reference to a variant of Cockney rhyming slang (Horlicks = bollocks).
• A commercial for Orbit gum features a woman walking in on her husband smooching his paramour — but because they're all chewing the gum that gives you a cleaner mouth, Unusual Euphemisms abound. Some of the insults slung between them are "son of a biscuit-eating bulldog!" and "you lint-licker!" In another Orbit commercial, two male cheerleading teams have a spat, but the coach tells them to "lay off the pumpernickel!"
  • "Kiss my Madagascar fanny pack" and "I'll pineapple-slap your ascot."
  • Similarly, a commercial for another brand of gum has a woman and a man in a romantic situation. The woman purrs, "Talk dirty to me." Having just popped a stick of the gum into his mouth, he says, "Skinnamarinky-dinky-dink, skinnamarkiny-doo..." (also a reference to the closing credits song from Sharon, Lois, and Bram's Elephant Show.)
• Snickers chocolate bars in their "Not going anywhere for a while?" campaign. The old man had just painted the Kansas City endzone to read "Chefs", then said "Great Googly-Moogly."
  • That particular line has its origins in the Cadets' 1956 cover of the Jay Hawks novelty song "Stranded in the Jungle", when the narrator, recalling his near-boiling experience in a cannibal tribe's cooking pot, exclaims "Great Googly-Moogly, get me outta here!"
  • Frank Zappa also used the phrase, in his song "Nanook Rubs It".
  • Related to "Chefs", its also a favorite minced oath of Alton Brown.
  • The Beast from Maggie and the Ferocious Beast also uses it.
  • Grady from Sanford and Son often uses "Great Googly-Moogly" as an expression of surprise.
  • Also related to Chefs: Kansas City Chiefs fans sometimes use the term "Chefs" to mock poorly-performing teams.
• Erectile dysfunction commercials are prone to this.
  • Viagra commercials. Due to FDA regulations, the ad is not allowed to mention the indication (to treat impotence) of the drug, which can lead to some fairly elaborate skits to get the point across. The tossing of a football through a tire in particular found a place in the cultural landscape.
  • Commercials for Cialis (a drug to treat erectile dysfunction) will feature a couple kissing and pawing one another. It will later cut to the couple sitting in separate bathtubs, usually in an outside scene. It may be the most unusual euphemism of them all, since no one seems to be able to figure out how this motif relates to sex.
  • A competing product, Enzyte, featured ads rife with wink-wink euphemisms such as: "He is a stiff negotiator"; "He is wood that will not bend"; "Bob is swelling with pride"; etc.
• An ad for Oreo Fudge Cremes has a family sampling the cookies and being moved to such exclamations as "Shut the front door!", "Mah Jongg!", and "Franklin Delano!"
• An ad for 1-800-GOT-JUNK had the homeowner, after seeing how fast his trash disappeared, exclaim "Son of a biscuit-eater!" The junkmen comment "That's a new one." "We should write that one down."
• An M&M's ad campaign where Red and Yellow quit their jobs through a strongly worded letter to Brown. Among the things they want to do with their free time are "breaking down in public and going into rehab". The letter ends with "Go fondue yourself".
• A builders merchant called Jewsons ran an advertising campaign in which the word Jewson was used where an expletive would have been used. “We’ve got the Jewson windows, we’ve got the Jewson doors, we’ve got the Jewson lot”.
• A manufacture of cheese or some other food ran adverts in which a “countryman” heard successive claims about the product, and replied to each “Cruddocks”, until he tried the product himself.