On Facebook today, an astonished observation by Martyn Cornell:
It’s early September — must be time for selling Christmas confectionery in the supermarkets of Britain …
Providing us with this store display for Christmas versions of Cadbury’s Puds:
The original Cadbury Pud — a brand name — is a Cadbury milk chocolate bar with a truffle centre, hazelnut pieces, and crunchy puffed rice pieces
I’d been unaware of Cadbury Puds (though I immediately understood where the brand name came from) but was momentarily take aback because of my long experience — going back, I believe, to my childhood — with an American vulgar noun pud ‘penis’, especially in pull one’s pud ‘masturbate oneself’ and pull someone’s pud ‘masturbate someone else’. I was dimly aware that British slang included the shortening pud of pudding in all of its senses, though primarily as short for BrE pudding ‘any dessert’ (which is where Cadbury got its brand name), but also for slang pudding ‘genitals’ (vagina or penis, depending on the context), in both BrE and AmE. Meanwhile, the shortening pud for foodstuffs of any kind is, I believe, not used at all in current AmE. Hence my momentary surprise at Cadbury’s brand name.
Martyn Cornell of course found the brand name unsurprising, maybe even clever. His problem was with putting the candies out for sale almost four months before Christmas.
A note on MC. Martyn Cornell is a both learnèd and genial historian of beer, especially British beer; note especially his 2011 book Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers.