Why do things change in such a confusing manner whilst staying the same? WTF has happened to Lidl? It’s done a Nestles.
Many years ago, Nestles was famously pronounced “Ness-ells”. Millions of children knew the jingle especially when associated with the Milky Bar Kid. “The Milky Bars are on me” he’d declare ahead of the invisible choir singing the jolly phrase “Ness-ells Milky Bar”.
Suddenly and for no readily apparent reason “Ness-ells” became “Nezz-lay”.
Why?
Well, I suppose it was the French company (properly called “Nezz-lay” because they’re or were, erm, French?) finally dragging the Brits into the modern world where things can have a French accent without being scary. Children, however, were traumatised and sales of Milky Bars dropped immediately in favour of Cadbury products.
Now, skipping through the era when strange things happened like the cleaning product ‘Jif’ inexplicably swapped the ‘J’ for a ‘C’ to become ‘Cif’, a bunch of Germans brought to Britain a strange and yet compelling down market grocery chain called ‘Lidl’. This is the chain normally used by white people who live here but are not of English origin, or people who have little to no money. It provides strangely named products, and packs of deliciously tasting reformatted cheese or is it ham or is it cheese or is it ham or is it the same product just randomly labelled cheese or ham depending on how the person sticking the labels on felt that day? It’s very cheap and addictive.
Excitingly, amongst all the cheap groceries are strange and previously unseen electrical and other hardware type products, man-toys. These are very cheap products too. These products have man-magnets attached to them forcing men to buy them and forget about buying groceries. I have dozens of LCD ‘weather stations’ listening to temperature probes outside in the garden but have never successfully returned with a bottle of milk.
Anyway, apart from not giving you carrier-bags for free, I’d never seen Lidl advertised on TV. I’d assumed this too was part of the plan to keep the prices so low.
Suddenly, Lidl appeared in a string of ads on TV! Wow! Nothing wrong with that, it might attract more shoppers to try it. No mention of the man-magnet toys though. That would have clinched it for me had I not known of the man-toys already, but maybe it would have dragged thousands of new guys in to browse the man-toys. A failing on the part of the advertising agency I mused!
The deep brown northern voice of whatshisname provided the voiceover for the commercial telling me how wonderful Lidl is, but, what? What’s that he just said?
Oh my god!
Forever, ‘Lidl’ has been pronounced “Lid-ull”. I don’t know anybody who pronounces it in any other way. The people in the stores pronounce it “Lid-ull”. There are even UK-Garage songs about Lidl that pronounce it “Lid-ull”. But. But. But.
Whatshisname the voiceover man was calling it “Leed-awl”.
“LEED-AWL”????
“LEED-AWL”????
When the feck did “Lid-ull” become “Leed-awl”?
Ok, I suppose it’s always been “Leed-awl” in Germany (pronounced “Deutschland”) because “leed” is how they pronounce “Lid” over there. But why did they leave it for so long before telling us Brits we were saying it so wrongly?
I feel so very violated.
The only way I can get over this is to go into Lidl right now and…and…and buy a man-toy!
England's England 