Shaun, you're slipping. You missed an opportunity to include a link in your posting about the TA's. Because of that, we don't know if you believe the "wax tadpole" story to be a true example of corporate cluelessness about naming products and the way those product names read overseas, or whether you're implying that the TA's story is, like the "wax tadpole" story, merely a bit of urban cokelore.

Similar examples, of course, include the story of the Chevy Nova, the Commodore VIC-20 (sold auf Deutschland as the VC-20, for Volkscomputer, supposedly because VIC sounds like a noun derived from the German verb wichsen, meaning "to wank") and the Toyota MR2 (sold, in France, under the name "MR", because it's literal pronunciation in French of "emm air duh" supposedly sounded a little too close to "merde").