Bottoms up!
You never know what makes a new product work — which is what makes the world of cheap design, print-on-demand production, and Amazon distribution so much fun, and occasionally profitable.
Take the “Happy Sukkot Gift Bags Jewish Festival Candy Box” that Jessica Russak-Hoffman discovered on Amazon last week.
According to the product description, “These Happy Sukkot gift bags are designed with exquisite patterns, including grapes, wheat, barley, figs, pomegranates, olives, branches, leaves and Happy Sukkot words, which are very exquisite and full of life.”
But what led Russak-Hoffman to press the buy button was the extremely incompetent product design by someone who didn’t realize that when you cut-and-paste Hebrew from the web to an app, there’s always a chance the Hebrew letters will forget they’re supposed to flow from right to left.
Which is how a design which wishes “happy sukkot” in English can present Hebrew characters that approximately spell out tuchus — the Hebrew-derived Yiddish word for bottom or buttocks — which — who knew! — is what you get when you write “sukkot” backwards.
(Tuchus, Merriam Webster informs us, was first cited in English way back in 1886; derived from the Hebrew tachat, “under, below,” it is too slangy, even in Yiddish, to appear in the three Yiddish dictionaries we have at hand.)
But if you want to wish your friends a Sukkot-themed bottoms-up this year, you may be out of luck. The particular product that Russak-Hoffman bought is now unavailable; her tweet went viral, with 70,000 views, not only due to the backsided nature of the Hebrew text, but also the hilarious marketing photos, which included the Sukkot/Tuchus boxes on the table for both Pesach and Chanukkah observances. While other sellers offer the products, none can guarantee delivery before Sukkot. If you want to try your chances at the sketchy Chinese Temu website, you can find the boxes with promises of delivery in “5-10” business days; maybe you’ll get lucky?
Or you could settle for such in-stock, if not necessarily tried-and-true, holiday items proclaiming “Happy Sukkot” such as green and yellow silicone wrist bands (24 for $12; two-day delivery for Amazon Prime customers) or 70-inch banners ($9; one-day delivery.)
But not all is silly tchotkes with sad typos in Amazon’s Sukkot section. A lulav and etrog set, from the plausibly sound brand “Arba Minim Central,” sells for $40, has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars from 41 customers, and is currently ranking #81,891 on Amazon’s “Home & Kitchen” best-sellers list and an even more impressive #233 in “Collectible Figurines.”
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