I guess it’s all in how you pronounce Sofa King

Words are funny beasts and even worse when you throw in all those grammar rules or use them in ways that can mean something entirely different depending on how you read and pronounce them.

Such is the case of the Northampton, England, company by the name of Sofa King and an advertising slogan that they have been using for year but have now been told by the advertising watchdog that they have to stop using it.

On the surface their slogan “Our prices are Sofa King Low!” seems to be pretty innocuous and is the same one that they have been using in all their advertising for the past nine years. However if you read it to yourself without any space between Sofa and King it comes out sounding totally different and apparently this is what has earned the company numerous complaints,

Apparently the Advertising Standards Authority received three complaints from readers of the ad in the most recent round of ongoing complaints to which Sofa King said in their defense that they have been using the slogan for years and while there was no intention to cause offence the ad had not been designed to ‘run together’.

Unfortunately the ASA didn’t agree

However, the ASA said that the phrase could be interpreted as a derivative of the swear word “fuck”, which research had found to be a word “so likely to offend that it should not be used in ads at all, even when it was relevant to the name of a product”. The ASA said because of that the slogan was likely to cause serious or widespread offence and it banned the business from continuing to use the phrase “Sofa King Low” in its advertising.

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

Personally I think it’s hilarious and people really need to stop being so ridiculous.

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Tags: advertising, England, Sofa King

About the Author

Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).