Why does the Starbucks mermaid have 2 tails?

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Why: I was looking at this clock on Etsy. You can see that early versions of the Starbucks logo were downright lewd. You can only see her fins today.

Answer: Because it's not a mermaid; it's a melusine! But first: the company is named after Starbuck, Captain Ahab's first mate in Moby Dick. In keeping with this theme, CEO Howard Shultz wrote:

Terry [Heckler] also poured over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren... That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself.

Here is the hiccup: a Siren is half-woman, half-bird. A mermaid, of course, is half-woman, half-fish. In Greek mythology, both creatures seduce men and drown them. In fact, some languages use the same word for both bird and fish creatures, such as the Maltese word sirena.

But that's neither here nor there.

The whole sex-symbol status of mermaids hinges on the question which part is "woman" - upper or lower. "The other type of mermaid" that hapless Fry was referring to would have problems attracting suitors, of course. And how do you do it with the normal type?

Wise mythologists came up with the answer, of course. And the answer is a two-tailed mermaid sometimes called a Melusine.

Voilà! In European folklore, she is a woman up top and a fish or serpent from the waist down. Sometimes she has wings or two tails. She barely ever wears a shirt.

So Starbucks had that chick on its earliest logo:

Then this, this, and this. She even has a belly button in the middle one.

And now a coffee bag has another stylized "siren" mermaid melusine on it, but I'm not posting it because I don't even like coffee. You can look at it here. It's also on the clock up there.

Source: DeadProgrammer's Cafe, Brand Autopsy

The More You Know: Though Dead Programmer posted that like 5 years ago, NENA left him this comment a month ago. Do you agree or disagree?

NENA 1 month ago

DO U THINK SIRENS DO EXIST I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW BECAUSE
THOSE MYTHICAL CREATURES ARE VERY INTRESTING I HOPE
ONE DAY I COULD FINDON U KNOW THEY ALSO SAY IF U FIND ONE
THEY COULD GRANT U A WISH .. IF I FIND ONE I WOULD WITH IF I COULD
BECOME LKE THEM LIKE A MERMAID WELL
ITS ME DONT CARE WAT PEOPLE SAY ITS MY BELIEF