A couple of days ago I posted a photo of a container of "Dairy Drink," which turns out to be sugared and watered down skim milk. The above drink is just plain old milk, but did the person who came up with "Dairylea" really think it would make people want to drink it?
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It seems like there are many weird adverts or logos for dairy products and other farm products from the old days. Maybe it was because there were a lot of independent producers back then and they didn't really have ad or marketing departments to make their products look slick compared to other products.
Mark -- looks like the image is on your local machine. (file:///Users/mark/Library/Application%20Support/ecto/attachments/200910221003.jpg)
Still, the name is gross.
This post is purest Ad Homonym.
Dairylea isn't the name of the product, it's the name of the product line and is short for the Dairymen's League Cooperative Association, which is a dairy cooperative. It's a New York state thing. I don't think they sell their own products anymore, I believe they mainly market and manage milk distribution for a heck of a lot of farms here in the NE.
I guess nobody has ever drank "AK-100" which is the most foul concoction to have ever been bottled.
This guy nails the review:
http://softdrinkreviews.blogspot.com/2008/11/bahamas-viii-mrs-frenchs-ak-100-vanilla.html
Dairylea's been used as a processed cheese brand in the UK for as long as I can remember. Can't say I ever thought the name sounded unappealing.
Here's an old advert for the stuff from the 80s.
http://www.retro-commercials.com/tag/dairylea/
It also comes in little foil wrapped triangles.
ah -- image is fixed. Dairycious!
Ahem, "Kids will do anything for the taste of Dairylea"
"Dairlylea" is a typo. A stray, extra L.
I can also vouch for Dairylea being used as a processed cheese brand name in the UK.
In England a lea (or lee) is also another word for a meadow, so the associations aren't that bad really. But the stuff still tastes like crap.
I don't get why that "sounds gross." I guess I aint geeky cool enough.
Ugh, I have to head off to the bathroom. I have been fighting a raging case of Dairylea. Maybe I have the swine flu.
Uhhhhh. . . Dairylea is a brand name-- notice how the carton says "DAIRYLEA Vitamin D MILK" on it?
It's milk.
Maybe it's just us dyslexic folk who see diarrhea and dairylea as similar. I've always thought that was kind of a weird brand name.
I'm sure there's some sort of reference or pun that I'm missing... but, yeah, count me under "Um, isn't a lea a meadowish area? Kind of pleasant and and pastoral and stuff?"
Dairylea sounds fine to me, but I pronounce it like "dair-ee-lee". I guess it could be problematic if you insisted on pronouncing it "dair-ee-lee-uh"...
My Dad was a dairy farmer in Upstate NY...
it's pronounced Dairy-lee
Diarrhea ends with an hea not an eah...
...
umm... yeah... uh... 'nuff said?
"Gi's a Dairylea triangle!"
"Wossit worf then?"
The brand name is familiar to me from kidhood, so it doesn't have icky associations.
Until you pointed them out to me. Bastard.
I grew up in Eastchester, NY, just North of the Bronx and New York City (Yes, I'm a wizened old geezer of 51 who reads boingboing every day). In the early and mid-60's, miniature versions of those very cartons depicted were consumed by hundreds of us wee tads in the Anne Hutchinson School cafeteria. I'm so sorry that none of us ever thought to pronounce it as anything other than "Dairy- Lee", as all other opportunities to exploit names for their grossness potential were seemingly otherwise utilized. Dang.
I recall a survey where they asked small children what they thought were nice names for girls, and they came up with odd things like "Larceny" and "Diarrhea", which sort of makes sense-- if you don't know the actual meaning it's a pretty enough word in and of itself, and do sort of sound like female given names. So I can't see anything weird about "Dairylea", even when shown the similarity to "diarrhea."
Another unfortunately named dairy product is the Japanese Calpis. It's basically fermented milk sweetened with ridiculous amounts of sugar -- even more than regular soda. It's marketed in the U.S. as Calpico.
One friend in Japan said the name always made him think of bovine urine. Japan has other disturbingly named beverages like the popular carbonated sports drink Pocari Sweat.
http://www.justhungry.com/sweet-cultured-taste-calpis
Collective sound of every UK viewer going "Huh? I don't get it", since Dairylea is and always has been 'dair-ee-lee' here (the lea is pronounced like sea, tea, pea).
Wasn't until I got to the comments that I figured out what the joke was supposed to be.
Or, diarrhoea, if you're a Brit. Perhaps the greater difference in spelling for us makes the similarity harder to spot. Plus the fact that, as mentioned above, we all know it's pronounced to rhyme with tea.
They used to have a jingle: Everybody likes Dairylea. Then they got into a big unlawful appropriation suit with Sara Lee or someone. I can't remember.
You're right! If you gratuitously mis-pronounce the word, it does sound kind of funny!
Or, if you're so used to seeing the word "diarrhea" end with "-ea," it LOOKS even funnier. Some people are either willfully dense or just plain stupid, cultural distinctions aside.
I'd never heard the word "Dairylea" spoken, and "Lea" (pronounced "lee-uh") is a popular girls' name in the States. Maybe that's a gratuitous mispronunciation, as well.
Well, I live in the US and read it as "Dairy-lee." It didn't make me think of an illness or a meadow, but if I saw that in the store I'd probably think it was a pretty strange name.
Grew up in Western New York and drank Dairylea. No one I knew thought anything odd about the name. That yellow and red carton brings back good memories.
Thus is an 86-year-old regional brand brought down to the sewer by the "dyslexia" of a Californian with a popular blog.
Not to sound grouchy, but like others from New York, I have many positive childhood associations of Dairylea. And I like the fact that it was a farmer-owned brand created to get decent milk prices despite resistance from entrenched milk middlemen.
"lea" part of the name comes from a forage plant (whether the common or Latin name I don't recall and it is only part of the name), I believe, or some such rich delicious cow grass. "Lucerne", another milk name, is the synonym for alfalfa, too.