Gortons/Gordons fish products
- Carter Tweed
Alternate:
Gordons fish products
Current:
Gortons fish products
1849 is a long time ago
Some people are claiming the Mass Memory Discrepancy Effect has happened to them with respect to Gortons Fish Products.
They swear the name was always "Gordons" and has changed everywhere since.
There is plenty of evidence for "Gordons", but all the offical references are for "Gortons".
"Trust the Gordons Fishermen" is a slogan familiar to many, but those many apparently have it wrong now.
Newspaper reports
On Dec 30, 1899 a newspaper reported a fishing schooner was shipwrecked in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, US. No-one was injured, but it was described as being owned by the "Gordon-Pew Fisheries company of Gloucester".
Gordans
There are also reports of people remembering the spelling as "Gordans"., but most references, going back through the early days of advertising from the company, show "Gortons".
Some old images do show the effect, however:
Mispronunciation
With such a long established brand, some unfamiliar with it and just hearing it for the first time rather than seeing it written, might well have misspelled it when the need to write it arose, and that explains why we see these documents with the alternate spelling. It seems likely the much more common "Gordon", as in the male first name, would be assumed if someone in that situation had to decide.
Gorton is actually a town near Manchester in Northern England and has no connection to the fishing industry.
Double take
When people are alerted to the Gordons/Gortons Mandela Effect, they often do a double-take and comment that they "thought" they'd noticed it being wrong before but didn't quite pay enough attention to determine it either way. It was literally on the peripheral of their memory, as if a part of their brain had decided it was not important enough to even spend time and effort focusing on. These people were aware of the MMDE phenomenon without being able to name or atriculate it.
Some even report a flip-flop with this one, in that since becoming aware of it, it's changed the other way for them. Again, this is seen with other MMDE's, the best known one being "Houston, we have a problem".
A thread on Reddit from psbowdi says:
In 2013. Bought Gordon's Fish Sticks often enough to have memorized that exact name only to see the name change to Gorton's and ask, "When the hell did that change?" Did a surname search to find it to be some derivative of Gordon which is popular enough to show in a graph on the page for Gordon BUT when you go to the page for Gorton it shows the same graph for Gordon - Gorton doesn't even exist on the graph.
Reports there also indicate when it seemed to change for some people - around 2012/2013.
The Wikipedia entry for Gortons does not mention Gordons at all.
In any case, there is definitely something fishy going on here.