UK chain store rethinks slight bed name problem
A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita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, Reuters UK is reporting Feb. 2nd.
In “Lolita,” a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter —
but Woolworth’s 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 web site.
“What seems to have happened is the staff who run the web site 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.”
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