As driven snow

'Pure' dairy-free spread is a butter substitute  I don't normally buy but it was left behind by visitors. It makes me smile because I know it would have had my father reaching for his fountain pen to contact the manufacturers, just as when he would write to the Vehicle Licencing Authority regarding certain three-letter combinations on car licence plates that meant something obscene in another tongue. (He not only spoke several European  languages but he was also well-versed in  
matters relating to the seamy side of life generally.)

"Dear Sirs," he would have written, " I feel duty-bound to inform you that your choice of a name for your no doubt excellent product does it no favours. Pure is an old word for canine excrement and while most people may not be aware of that fact, the few who are would, I suggest,  be inclined to choose another brand of spread, thus leading you to lose sales."

Pure was so called because it was an essential ingredient in the tanning of leather, that required the raw hides to be purified, softened and rendered pliable and odourless. In Victorian Britain the collecting of pure off the streets was one of the many low-life trades than enabled impoverished people to get by. Pure-finders (men, women and children) went out with buckets to collect the dog poo which in those days was mostly hard and white because dogs then were fed on bones and little else. The tanneries paid well at first but as time went by more people engaged in the trade and the profit margin went down. For those who were reliant on pure for an income it was a wretched way to earn a meagre living. Henry Mayhew, the great Victorian journalist of  London's underclass interviewed an elderly widow who found it hard to make ends meet from pure. There's a touching re-enactment of his interview with her here, from the BBC Timewatch series.

And from the Vet Times here's a fuller explanation of the occupation of pure-finding. Those Victorian street collectors would surely have been amazed to find pure comes in plastic tubs today and you spread it on your toast.