Why are the same few phrases on the box of every chinafake?
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"SPECIFICATIONS, COLOURS AND CONTENTS MAY VARY FROM ILLUSTRATIONS". Chances are if you're in the chinafake sphere (or frequently peruse toys at flea markets, dollar stores, or the like), you've come across this exact phrase before (with some minor variations in punctuation, spelling, etc., of course). But why is this on everything you see? And when you delve into that you begin to think about other things, like why all of these toys simultaneously claim to be "the best welcome gifts for the children". The answer, shockingly, is pretty simple. The people putting the boxes together just take random English text from the boxes of other toys and put it on their box without really knowing what it means. It's the same reason why "INCLUDES TARDIS TALKING MONEY BANK" appears on a ton of items that, in fact, do not include it. What's significantly more interesting is where these phrases come from, and in some cases how they got so "mangled". While the origin of most of these phrases is not entirely known, the origin of one (somewhat) is. (Spoiler, it's the first one). You may recall Ashens pointing out in a video that this phrase never made all too much sense. If you can believe it, the phrase that originally appeared on chinafake boxes sometime in the late 80s to mid 90s was "specifications and colours of contents may vary from illustrations", which makes WAY more sense. Gradually, the "of" disappeared and commas were added as it leapt from box to box. Another smaller change that you can actually sort of see occur in real time is the Italian version of the text "Not suitable for children under 3 years". This phrase had actually been modified already by the time it made it to the early 2000s, it was originally "36 months", which was only changed for the English version of the phrase (usually, three different versions in various languages are displayed next to each other on boxes). The phrase originally began with "NON ADATTO" ("not suitable" in Italian) which you can see on the boxes of items from around 2000. However, by the time we make it to 2003 it instead begins with "NO N ADATTO", and that typo has persisted even today.