mathewWhen I moved to the US it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why there were bears on the Charmin toilet paper wrapper.
gjm@mathew@universeodon.com Maybe I'm being dim, but even after looking it up I don't see anything that should have been obviously guessable.
(Maybe really it's an is-the-Pope-catholic joke? It doesn't seem to be one officially.)
mathew@gjm@mathstodon.xyz I'm pretty sure it's a Pope-Catholic reference. Apparently the bear mascots were originally from the UK and introduced here in 2000. I can totally see some UK ad agency guys suggesting bears as a sneaky reference.
Apparently it's also not officially confirmed whether they're black bears or brown bears.
gjm@mathew@universeodon.com It certainly seems plausible that that's the origin (though, again, it doesn't seem to me so obviously so that anyone should feel bad about not seeing it) but if it comes from the UK doesn't that make it less likely? (In my head, "does a bear shit in the woods?" is more an American than a British idiom.)
Having said all of which, I understand that the first ever TV commercial involving the Charmin bears has them literally shitting in the woods, in which case there doesn't seem much room for doubt :-).
mathew@gjm@mathstodon.xyz Even back in the 90s I was so familiar with American idiom that I'd find it hard to tell what is and what isn't familiar phrasing in the UK. (I remember PRT10 commenting on my use of US idioms on GROGGS.)