Kiwis rip their heads in half and dance for your enjoyment

I’m British, and always call them Kiwi Fruit or Chinese Gooseberries.

My daughter attends an international school in Tokyo. While it’s an American foundation, they allow parents to choose if their children are to be taught American or British spellings and so on.

That’s a good way of accommodating the international variations in accent and spelling patterns.

Anyway, those kiwifruits on the video are singing as: We are the “kiwi”, Zespri “kiwi”. Dietary fibre, kalium, vitamin C, E!

The Japanese are also calling them in various way like Q-we, kee-uh-E, and such. Our Engrish is different. The Japanese has much serious problem on calling kiwifruit properly.

What’s a kiwifruit?

But the bigger question here to which I am referring is whether the name given a thing by its originators should be honoured. In a similar vein, should we all write “Pearl Harbor” the American way, since it is an American placename, or is the “Harbor” part assumed to be more descriptive, and thus it is acceptable to change the spelling to the local variant?

Is it too late to call dictionary fight? I think it is.

That is interesting. The commercial seems to indicate that the Japanese adapted the 外来語　of the name of the fruit from American English and not British English, though I think that would be due mainly for historical/shortness (in katakana) reasons.

(Edit: My electric dictionary for clarification! It lists the terms for kiwi in Japanese first for the birds found in New Zealand and then as the bottom entry, clarifying the “kiwi = ~fruit”. As in most conversational languages, dictionaries are not always followed.)

No, complete miss of my point.