Sunday, February 3, 2008

Right up there with the Chevy No-va....

This from my friend Logan, who posted it on Facebook:

Shop pulls "Lolita" bed for young girls
Fri Feb 1, 2008 2:01pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita," a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting website.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told British newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

"Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect," the chain said.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

(Reporting by Peter Apps, editing by Paul Casciato)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somehow this needs to be in my dissertation.

Anonymous said...

This really did happen, and I'm kind of sad no one but no one had even heard of the book or even the fillum.

But the "Nova" story is apocryphal:

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Rob said...

But the Bite the Wax Tadpole thing is kind of true!

I'm amazed -- AMAZED, I tell you -- that none of the sales staff at that store knew "Lolita" implies. Aren't crappy-ass retail jobs supposed to be the last refuge of the overeducated?