The stories behind the brand names of automobiles is sometimes surprising. The name of the Audi derives from a bilingual pun involving a German word, and Mazda honors the central deity of Zoroastrianism, with which the car company’s founder had a fascination. This is part of a complete episode.
Leave a comment
1 comment
More from this show
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
I suspect the fancy stuff about the heavenly meaning of Ahura-mazda was tacked on later. The founder was Matsuda, which would be pronounced Masda in rapid speech. He wanted to pick a less confusing spelling for Westerners. Mazda was already familiar as a brand of light bulbs.