Re: Two Articles about What Brits Know (or Don't)...

In article <qipfq3t672klmi90kflt2go962oqngspeq@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, 
fair****tfan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 says...
> Two articles i ran across online lately (the first is actually a
> comment on the original article; the full original Reuters article is
> at http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL0167874620080201)
> 
> [quote]
> 
> UK Woolworths Pulls "Lolita" Bed For Six-Year-Old Girls
> 
> By Robert Paul Reyes
>  
> "A shopping chain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and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 ***ually active preteens. 
> 
> Woolworths said staff who administer the website selling the beds were
> not aware of the connection."
> 
> (Quotation from Reuters)
> 
> The British school system must not be all this it's cracked up to be,
> if the techies who manage a Web site aren't familiar with the ***ual
> connotation of the word "Lolita."
> 
> You don't have to be an English major to know that "Lolita" is a novel
> about a man who has a ***ual relation****p with his 12-year-old
> stepdaughter. But even if you've never read a book in your life, the
> word "Lolita" has entered the lexicon as slang for a ***ually
> precocious young girl. 
> 
> Is Western society producing a generation of young people who can
> program an iPod and create a Web site, but don't know the first thing
> about literature and art?

Knowing literature would tell you the origin of the term, but the 
meaning itself should be clear to anyone who's ever received ****-
related spam or stumbled onto a dirty website.

Methinks they've got the "techies" part wrong, though. The 
administrative staff doing data entry is probably as far from actually 
"running" the website as possible. And actual techies have better things 
to do than surf the item database for squicky product names.

Then again, maybe there are some extremely stupid British techies after 
all. Wasn't it in Britain where a guy was arrested for making a donation 
with Lynx? 

rgds,
netcat