Racist toys for kids, part one: The Hot’N'Tot warmer pillow

I spotted this incredibly inappropriately-named children’s product last night in the chain store Butler’s in Islington, London. It’s difficult to know where to begin with just how wrong this is. It’s got to go down as maybe one of the worst clusterfucks in marketing/product naming history. It seems there are other animals in the Hot’N'Tots range – a bear, for example, on the Butler’s Germany online store, which also has a glamour shot on Butler’s Hungary’s Flickr account. But it doesn’t make the play on words OK. Here’s their contact form, should you want to get in touch…

The name Khoekhoe most accurately translates to ‘People People’. They were traditionally—and are still occasionally in colloquial language—known to white colonists as the Hottentots, a name that is currently generally considered offensive (e.g. by the Oxford Dictionary of South African English). The word “hottentot” meant “stutterer” or “stammerer” in the colonists’ northern dialect of Dutch, although some Dutch use the verb stotteren to describe the clicking sounds (klik being the normal onomatopoeia, parallel to English) typically used in the Khoisan languages. (Source)