Every time a photo of someone’s completely inappropriate Halloween costume goes viral, the internet collectively facedesks and groans “how did you not know that wasn’t okay?”. Which is pretty much the response that everyone had when @Africasacountry tweeted this photo of an Icelandic hotel’s poorly chosen cocktail name:

Well, almost everyone.


To give you a bit of context, Icelandic Air owns the hotel where the offending item was discovered. Apparently the government-sanctioned racist institution that existed in South Africa for half a century is not widely recognized in Iceland. It was only after a number of outraged reactions were tweeted that the airline finally Googled the word “apartheid.”

The airline rushed to apologize for the ignorance of the staff member who named the cocktail, tweeting that “she thought the word just meant separation and did not understand the connotation and historical significance.” They somehow neglected to explain how the airline’s social media manager didn’t know what apartheid was either.

Grapevine reports that as of Friday, the cocktail had been scrubbed from the hotel’s menu, much like the chances of us flying Icelandic Air anytime soon.

[via Grub Street]