Via Der Spiegel…

If you spend much time in Germany, it won’t take long before you notice that speaking the language really isn’t that difficult. Any time you’re at a loss for a German word, just throw in some English and move on. For one thing, it’s the height of coolness to sprinkle your German with English. And for another, even if your German friends don’t understand, they’ll smile and nod for fear of looking dumm.

Plus, they do it too. Words like "office" and "meeting" long ago entered the German vocabulary. "Babysitten" and "downloaden" have been adopted. Even the word "people" has been molded to suit the needs of the German language — the term has a negative connotation to indicate folks who are disagreeable and tiresome.

Well that’s how some native English speakers use it too.  But…anyway…

But when it comes to advertising slogans, the use of English is becoming passé. Some advertisers have realized that many Germans just don’t understand — or even worse, misunderstand — their hip slogans. Even such straightforward lines like "Come in and find out," for a chain of perfume stores, can be dodgy. It seems most Germans cycled the slogan through their spotty understanding of English and thought it meant, "Come in, but then go back out again."

…

…The Vodafone slogan "Make the Most of Now" has weird associations with fruit juice ("Most") for many Germans. "Welcome to the Beck’s Experience" didn’t work so well because many thought the last word meant "experiment." The grand prize for slipshod slogans, though, goes to German television station Sat1, which used the catchphrase "Powered by Emotion." This was taken by many to be a modern version of "Kraft durch Freude," the Nazi party’s leisure organization, often translated into English as "strength through joy."

I wonder what the person who did the test marketing on that one made of the startled looks they got.  Hey…this one’s really getting their attention…!  Way back before there was an Exxon…there was the Humble Oil and Refining Company, and its other trade names Esso and Enco.  Then the gods of the corporate boardroom decreed there should be one name for the company everywhere in the world.  At one point they figured to just rebrand all their existing gas stations as "Enco", which was Humble’s acronym for "ENergy COmpany", only to discover that "Enco" translated into "broken engine" in Japanese.

So they invented a word.  Exxon.  It means nothing, they took the family name of a sitting governor and added an extra ‘X’ to it and now it’s the company name.  A lot of corporations are doing that now.  Lexus.  Acura.  Genstar.  Allegis.  Enron.  They’re non-words…words that never were…words that mean precisely nothing.  But because they are empty meaningless words they are absolutely unique and can’t embarrass the company in some far away corner of the world.  As it turns out, the only universal language consists of words that don’t mean anything.