I was in Target and for a really rare change of pace didn't buy a peanut butter cup and a Diet Coke from them. Not even a Coke Zero. (I'd needed to get soap, and I got some liquid soap to use by the bathroom sink, now that I've finally found one that has a reasonably pleasant hand feel and scent.) While getting in line for check-out, I looked over the candy at point-of-purchase and saw a brand I'd never seen before. I haven't had that experience since, of course, leaving Singapore where there would regularly be strange British- or Japanese-language candies to disrupt the normal day. Very attractive wrapper, with a name running prominently on the upper right side, some odd composition of the display elements, and an all-lowercase name that grew as the word progressed. And what a name, too: ``spunow''.
Spunow! What a perfect candy name. It doesn't sound like anything else, but if you wanted to assemble letters so that they sounded intriguing without losing ease of pronunciation what better could you do? You can hear right away the cheery commercials of kids shouting out ``Spunow!'' like they had won a game. How do you not begin to smile at thinking of the sounds? With that uplifting hint of ``wow'' at the end ... this has to either be a fantastic candy and one poised for grand international success, or else it's an utter disaster being saved from a massive write-off by the fortune of a good marketing guy making up the name. I went to get a bar -- or bag -- or whatever it was inside.
It turns out someone had put in a Mounds bar package upside-down.
And I don't even like Mounds bars. But oh, what a time not to be a candy maker, since if there were ever a name poised for sugary greatness, there it is. I suppose it might be used for that million-dollar idea for an Internet gadget to sell to Google, and it has almost got the right ring for a meaningless but popular Internet waste of time, but ... no, the name is almost wrapped in chocolate. It must be candy.
Trivia: The Mounds candy bar, created by the Peter Paul Candy Manufacturing Company of New Haven, Connecticut, was named in 1920 by Peter Paul Halajian and five Armenian associates. Source: Sweets: A History of Temptation, Tim Richardson.
Currently Reading: Designing the Molecular World: Chemistry at the Frontier, Philip Ball.
