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"Warning: read and keep," says the piece of paper inside Kinder Surprise Eggs, in 34 languages; yet most people do neither thing. But sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris did read and keep it, and study what the egg is trying to tell us: about Kinder Egg toy safety, yes, but also about multilingualism, about an object that says 'yes!' but the warning says 'no!', about the signs of human idiosyncracy that show themselves even in a mandatory corporate message.
DISCLAIMER: This podcast is not affiliated with or sponsored by Kinder Eggs or any Ferrero products.
EXTRA MATERIALS:
Keith is still seeking more translations of the warning message; can you supply any of these languages?
We didn’t talk about the edible part of a Kinder Egg, but on this episode of the Podern Prometheus, Keith had to eat all the Kinder products and spoiler: that’s too much Kinder in one go.
We barely talked about the toys either, but here is the Guinness World Record-holding collection thereof.
Otherlusionists: in Keith’s book The Babel Message, he constructs his own language to translate the warning message, and mentions language constructor David J. Petersen, who appeared in the Verisimilitude episode talking about constructing languages for Game Of Thrones. We also discuss the Rosetta Stone briefly, but it is discussed less briefly in The Key Part 1: Rosetta episode.
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YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
exciton, noun, physics: a mobile concentration of energy in a crystal formed by an excited electron and an associated hole.
CREDITS:
Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist and writer. His book The Babel Message studies the Kinder Egg warning message and translates it into more languages.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman.
The original Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com, using some Kinder Eggs as instruments.
Find the show at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/allusionistshow.
