My 1-year kid has a plastic ball that is decorated with all 26 letters from the English alphabet and besides each letter is an image. I suppose the images are of words in English that begin with each of the letters. That works for all of them, except for the Y, which image looks like an axe to me. I searched for synonyms for axe (hatchet, tomahawk) but could not find one that starts with Y.
Following is a picture I took from the ball where the Y and it's image can be seen. Y is surrounded by Queen, Nail, Worm, Elephant and Kangaroo, I suppose.
Can someone help me identify which English word is depicted in Y?
The complete list of letter/symbol pairs, for those asking, is Apple, Bear, Cat, Dog, Elephant , Frog, Giraffe, House, Ice, Jet, Kangaroo, Lion, Mouse, Nail, Owl, Pig, Queen, Rainbow, Snail, Tiger, Uboat (submarine), Volcano, Worm, Xylophone, Y / axe, Zebra.
And thanks to @jkej's Google sleuthing, another view of the ball may be seen at the site fishpond.com.
I bought the ball in a store called Lojas França, located in a mall called Bourbon Shopping Wallig in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil.
Edit – I was looking for any sign that could help us identify the manufacturer of the ball and all I could find were the letters DNE near the air valve. Following is an image of that part of the ball, in case it helps:
Best Answer
A suspect
I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word:
Forensics
I say this on the basis that:
y
.y
and having a meaning relating to axe"¹ and the only thing suggested was yataghan: "a long Turkish knife with a curved blade having a single edge". An image search tells us that no ball-maker would confuse this sword-like blade for an axe.y
: yanmaodao (Chinese), yari (Japanese), and yatagan (Turkish). These are all sword-like weapons, not axe-like, and as mentioned in the previous bullet, of the three, only yatagan has made it into English dictionaries.y
was Swedish yxa.Cross-checking the translation from Swedish back into English confirmed that Swedish yxa is English axe. And indeed it is used in Swedish children's primers to illustrate the letter
y
, as you can see from the children's book excerpt above.The crime scene
As for the other symbols on the ball, we can analyze which letter-symbol pairings make sense in each language. Here I've tagged each pairing with ✅ to indicate "the name a toddler would shout out for the depicted object starts with the corresponding letter", ❌ for "no, it doesn't", and ❓ for "this pairing merits further discussion".
In English, the pairings are Apple✅, Bear✅, Cat✅, Dog✅, Elephant✅, Frog✅, Giraffe✅, House✅, Ice✅, Jet✅, Kangaroo✅, Lion✅, Mouse✅, Nail✅, Owl✅, Pig✅, Queen✅, Rainbow✅, Snail✅, Tiger✅, Uboat❓, Volcano✅, Worm✅, Xylophone✅, Y / axe❌, Zebra✅.
In Swedish, these correspond to Äpple❌, Björn✅, Katt❌, Hund❌, Elefant✅, Groda❌, Giraff✅, Hus✅, Is✅, Jet✅, Känguru✅, Lejon✅, Mus✅, Spik❓², Uggla❌, Gris❌, Drottning❌, Regnbåge✅, Snigel✅, Tiger✅, Ubåt✅, Vulkan✅, Mask❌³, Xylofon✅, Yxa✅, Zebra✅.
As you can see, because most of these words
most pairings are sensible in both languages.
All told, in Swedish there are 8 words which simply do not fit, not to mention that, as @jkej points out, a Swedish ball would also have to present the letters
Å
,Ä
andÖ
, and would possibly choose to omitW
. This rules out the possibility that this is a ball made for the Swedish market.For English, on the other hand, outside the mysterious
Y
, all the pairings use straightforward, non-suspicious common nouns an English-speaking toddler would be familiar with4.Except for one. That U-boat is Swedish-fishy.
A new clue
Almost no one refers to submarines as U-boats in contemporary English. Quoting @tchrist's response to that information:
Which is evidence against the maker of the ball being completely familiar with English as she is spoke.
There's also positive evidence for "U" is for "U-boat" in Swedish children's primers. Quoting @jkej in the comments:
And indeed it's easy to turn up Swedish pedagogical material having both
Y
= yxa andU
= ubåt, like this one from the Swedish site imgrum.com:But it doesn't stop there.
Following the footprints
Following @jkej's lead on Fishpond.com, I found the manufacturer is Ball, Bounce and Sport Inc.5
This is page 32 of their online catalog (you need to install Adobe Flash; their PDF catalog is broken6):
Item G: 54-4155; #10 A-Z Phonics; 0-33149 04155-9
However, though Fishpond.com listed "Ball, Bounce and Sport Inc." as the ball's manufacturer, upon visiting BB&S' site, one immediately notices the headers and copy all immediately point to another name:
Structurally, Ball, Bounce and Sport Inc. was once a subsidiary of Hedstrom, and through a series of fits and starts in the last century, eventually took ownership of the Hedstrom brand, and now is doing business as Hedstrom.
That is, Hedstrom is the ball manufacturer's preferred name for branding purposes. Which is interesting, because the name "Hedstrom" is Scandinavian; per Wikipedia's article on the surname:
Tailing the suspect
So is the name Hedstrom indicative of Swedish influences on the ball's manufactoring process?
The Smart Business article linked above on BBS taking ownership of the the Hedstrom brand notes:
No mention of international markets. However, one influence I can find of non–North American interests in Hedstrom is that these sources confirm that manufacturing is done in Asia, as other answers and comments suggest:
But what about Sweden? I've read several different histories of Hedstrom. The accounts are confusing and at points seemingly contradictory, involving many name changes.
But the salient event was in 1981:
But if Eagle was the company who built up the play ball business, whence the the acquiring company, Hedstrom? According to this column of Harry Rinker, who is an antiques appraiser and thereby somewhat of an historian:
Thus the name Hedstrom originates from three Swedes in 1915. The catalog above is dated ~2012, and page 32 lists several of the playballs as new, but not the phonics one, so it's not clear when the ball was first produced. But certainly a century passed between the reason for naming the company Hedstrom and producing the ball.
So, with a century and countless mergers, bankruptcies, and restructurings intervening, the Swedish name Hedstrom, while intriguing, cannot be adduced as evidence that the
Y
stands for yxa.The interrogation
I reached out to Hedstrom via their online contact form, Twitter, and Facebook. They replied to me this morning via Facebook:
They confirm your ball is not an official Hedstrom A-Z Phonics ball. The official ball has a yo-yo for the letter
Y
. The Hedstrom ball also has a UPC and producer's mark.Further, Hedstrom confirms they do no business internationally (outside Canada, one assumes), and they're not aware of any specific producers who have a known history of copying their designs.
A second customer service representative actually responded separately to my contact via their website, instead of Facebook. She did her own forensics, and corroborated that Hedstrom's opinion is that this is a knock-off ball:
One last follow-up, and she shared the history of the ball, to the extent she was able to dig up:
Going under cover
So that trail runs cold. The ball is a knock-off. Let's examine it in more detail for clues.
Indeed, additional analysis reveals that your ball and the Hedstrom ball are very similar, but not identical. There are some differences which have to be taken into account.
In particular, @H Walters points out that the layout — that is, the positions of the symbols relative to one another — are different in your photograph than in the catalog thumbnail for the Hedstrom ball:
And, as @m69 further points out:
Note also that in the photo of the ball that Hedstrom sent me,
V
is used for vase, not volcano,R
is for robot, not rainbow, and the drawing of the nail forN
is a slightly different style than on your ball.The stake-out
Finally, at @jkej's prompting:
I asked my contact at Hedstrom, and she replied:
Based on this, @jkej's analysis is:
DNE evidence
So a third-party made a knock-off version of the ball, not unusual in Asian manufacture, and introduced these differences, and perhaps picked up some Swedish contagion in the process.
To confirm that, we'll have to pick up the scent of this mysterious DNE you found near the valve of your ball.
But to do that, we have to start at the other end of the trail. I've reached out to Lojas França via email and Facebook. The email bounced, but there's still hope they'll reply on Facebook.
A hot lead!
Meanwhile, an informant, @Brad Koch, has it from some good sources in shady corners of the internet that the ball has been found. From @thedrake on HackerNews:
And what do we spy in the SW and SE corners of the right image (zoom in):
Y
:U
:Our suspects! Hiding in China, right where our intelligence said they'd be. And all the other images match as well.
Now to track down the manufacturer of these knock-off balls.
The chase afoot
From the Alibaba link, we find (one) producer of these balls is Shanghai Jianhuiling Sporting Goods Co., Ltd. Tracking down the markets they operate in leads us to:
A final fingerprint
So while Hedstrom is not responsible for the axe on your ball, there is one last piece of evidence that
Y
=yxa.We find the ball again on a Swedish user's Pinterest page.
In fact, this one of only 3 sites I could find anywhere on the Internet with an image of your ball7.
Case
closedopenAfter all this, one thing is certain. Since the original designer of the ball, an American company whose employees are native speakers of English, used yo-yo to illustrate
y
, we know the intended word is not English.Overall, adulteration of the ball with Swedish words seems indicated, though far from definitive.
But it's the best theory I've got. Except of course for @Vincent Fourmond's conclusion that we're dealing here with a yakety axe.
¹ I also tried "and related to": hatchet, chop, and cut, even though the latter two words are verbs and all the other symbols on the child's ball represent concrete nouns. Nothing material emerged.
² We could make a case for N also fitting for Swedish, as @konaya points out, by observing the depicted object could as easily be a tack, which is nubb in Swedish.
³ Note that the
E
andK
which are on the northermost latitude in the photograph have different orientations, and the symbol always has the same orientation as its letter (i.e., the top of the symbol shows you where the top of the letter is) so there is no concern that theW
for worm might beM
for maggot or anything.I say this because I wondered for a moment whether the illustrator mistook
Y
for an upside-downh
in hatchet.4 Which, taken as a holistic pattern, makes the yellow theory very dubious.
5 Since this question was asked, the Fishpond.com product page has been removed, with no redirect. Likely that's due to the the popularity of this question causing many people to hit that page (which listed an out-of-stock item), causing needless load from their perspective. But through shrewd parameter hacking, @biolauri got Google to serve up a cached version. A screenshot is available here, for when the cache inevitably gets flushed and also disappears.
With the cached Fishpond.com page in hand, @H Walters did some source snooping and noticed a number of references to the same number as in the Fishpond.com URL: 0033149041559. Many of these references were meta tags and hidden input fields, variously labelled barcode as in
<input type="hidden" name="barcode" value="0033149041559" id="barcode" />
or gtin13 as in<meta itemprop='gtin13' content='0033149041559' />
. It also exactly matches the code in the catalog (see caption under catalog screenshot; there it is listed in component form Indicator-Company Prefix–Item Reference-Check Digit), and a barcode search confirms the company prefix 0033149 is indeed owned by Ball, Bounce and Sport Inc.An interesting discrepancy, however. While the Fishpond.com and BBS catalog barcode item reference match (04155), the associated "part numbers" do not. The catalog shows 54-4155: that is, group number 54 (likely "decorated play balls"), species 4155 (same as bar code item reference, less the leading 0). But Fishpond.com shows Other Information: 54-4246T, which is the same group number (54, decorated play balls), but a different species 4246T.
6 And we also know the wholesale price per dozen as of April 2013 was $1.77, thanks to this price sheet (file name "HedstromSpecialtyPriceListApril2013.xls") tracked down by @Mari-Lou's UPC hunting skills.
Note that the UPC / barcode is the same as in the catalog, 0-33149-04155-9, but the item number differs. The ~2012 catalog has 54-4155, but the 2013 price list has 54-41554. This may be a typo, or it may be additional substantiation that one UPC may be used for different versions of the product.
7 One potential risk here is that the Pinterest.se page was dynamically generated just for me, based on cookies set during the course of my research into "Swedish" and a young child's toy. Note the Swedish header translates to just a generic a "check out these fine products", and all the products offered are to toys for young children, related to reading, and all the descriptions are in English. But I think the risk here is low: I found the site through a reverse image search on Google, which suggests it pre-existed my research.