What’s in my name?
No, today’s post will not be about our, everyone’s favorite, Henry Tudor.)) Today will be a text about names. More precisely about the names of cigarette brands and although many of them seem to be made up from the background, but definitely not all of them. I will tell you about some of them today.
By the way, I wonder – is it only the Russian, formerly Soviet, habit of giving incomprehensible brands of cigarettes “their” names? Or are smokers in other countries also sharp-tongued? “Bychki Trotuarnye”, “Mattress”, “Bratskaya Mogila”, “Death under Sail”….. Well, that’s creative! )))
However, not all brands need to be “decoded” somehow, some of them are named according to the principle “what I see is what I sing about”. Here, for example, Polish cigarettes of the 90s “Big-Pack” – everything is clear, literally – a big pack. It is indeed larger than the standard 20 cigarettes, but there were no other cigarettes produced under this brand.
Or there’s Bicycle cigarettes. That’s Bicycle. Why a bicycle? What’s the connection with smoking? What’s it all about? I don’t know. Maybe it’s exotic, though. W.D. & H.O. made that brand. Wills for Nigeria and maybe the bikes were exotic to the locals?
Well, that name is pretty self-explanatory. I don’t think a translation is necessary. Despite the minimalist design, there is no understatement.))) They were made, by the way, in the States, in the 1960s.
Some brands have names that you can’t even pronounce…. Although, the clue is in the design of the pack. The rights to produce these Spanish cigarettes belonged to the soccer club Barcelona. In general, up to the “noughties” many sports clubs did not bother to produce their own cigarettes, so to speak in support).
Or here is another similar example – cigarettes named after the Spanish soccer club Real Betis.
Here with the name everything is more or less clear – the name of the river. Especially if you consider the graphic “legend” on the back of the pack. But this was not always the case with this brand.
What do you think these cigarettes are? It’s the same Drina, but released in the early 90’s and because of the lack of paper it was packaged in a book sheet from the library of Sarajevo. And it’s not some stylized limited edition, it’s really a leaf from some library reference book! That was the story…
Here’s the title is kind of from the background. But no! It is a kind of dedication, and the most tobacco, namely to Jean Nico, the very guy who introduced the Old World with tobacco. By the way, the factory where these cigarettes were produced had the same name – Tabacos Jean, S.A..
And these cigarettes are dedicated to a historical character directly connected with tobacco. Can anyone remember who John Rolfe was? That’s right, he was one of the first American settlers that started planting tobacco in Virginia and it is to him we should be grateful for the tobacco that he managed to cultivate to a smokable state. But now, with all this anti-tobacco persecution, John Rolfe’s name is more often associated not with tobacco, but with his wife known as Pocahontas. Seriously, I have already met such “background” information from modern sources: John Rolfe is the husband of Pocahontas. And that’s it… That’s how history gets rewritten…..
I bet a lot of people still remember these English cigarettes. What’s a John Player? It’s the name of the founder of the company from which the brand grew. John Player tobacco manufactory was founded in 1861, and when the family business was passed on to the founder’s sons, John Dane and William Goodacre, the company was renamed John Player & Sons.
This brand is from the same manufacturer, but in the 1970s, when these cigarettes were released on the market, he was no longer independent and was under the wing of Imperial Tobacco.
Here is the name of these cigarettes has not so obvious “translation”. Wikipedia will helpfully tell you that Belvedere is a palace built in Vienna in the early 18th century. Is that it? Not quite. Belvedere cigarettes are Austrian, produced since 1930s, and they are dedicated not to the palace, but to its owner – Prince Eugene of Savoy, one of the most successful Austrian commanders in countless battles against Turkey, France and Spain.
I have already imagined almost what our smokers would come up with if these Bulgarian cigarettes were widely sold here)))) Actually, it’s an abbreviation for “Beograd – Bar”. These are two stations, the beginning and the end, of one of the most impressive, as they say, mountain railroad lines in the world. It was completed in 1976 and cigarettes were issued for this event. Question – from whom did Bulgarians learn to abbreviate names like this?
They say that if you say the brand of these cigarettes thirteen times in a row, chanting, on the full moon, you can summon a demon) That’s how smokers need to dislike that would call cigarettes DeP6utaM9adre?! The only thing that turned up with the same name was a brand name for Argentine knitwear. Apparently, so that there were not too many demons, the name on the pack was printed in the most unreadable font)).
And lastly, here’s another problem. These cigarettes seem to be produced by the American RJR, but how come “camel” is misspelled?! And it’s because it’s also a historical dedication. Cigarettes with this name were produced at the very beginning of the 20th century by the Russian-Turkish Cigarette Company and they were successfully sold in the North American states. And, yes, “kamel” is a Russian synonym for “camel,” although there were other variants of the word in our language.
