First a note from Scott Lahti, then a couple of comments:

From the folks wot brought you the “Li’l Hef” bathrobe for boys, and the sale on “Choirboy robes, half-off”, the latest reason for any image-conscious corporation to keep at least one English major on retainer:

Woolworths pulls “Lolita” bed for young girls

Fri Feb 1, 9:22 AM ET
[From Reuters]

A shopping chain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active preteens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the website 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 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 newspapers.

“We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) 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)

Lahti then adds:

Just like the
Old man in
That book by Nabokov.

– The Police.

I had to double-check the lyrics, because I thought Lahti had remembered them incorrectly.

The way I hear the song in my head is “Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov!”

Apparently the lyrics that play in my memory are from the 1986 version, which added the word “famous.” It made other very significant changes, as well, making it my favorite song by The Police: “a new, brooding arrangement with a different chorus and a more opulent production” according to Wikipedia.

I had an argument with a college acquaintance about the new version, as we listened to it on the juke box and played a game of 8-ball. He thought they’d ruined his “favorite Police song.” I thought they’d made it what it should have been from the beginning. He said you couldn’t dance to it anymore. I said a song about statutory rape maybe shouldn’t be danceable. He had no idea what I was talking about.

“The lyrics,” I said. “They call for a much moodier treatment.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’ve never listened to the words before.”

Remember: he claimed this was his favorite Police song.

So anyway, my first reaction when reading this Reuters article about the Lolita bed was, How can they not know what “Lolita” means? My second reaction was, Have they never even heard “Don’t Stand So Close” by The Police? Then my third reaction was to recall that brief pool-hall debate and realize that either (a) they, like my classmate, had “never listened to the words before” or (b) did listen to the words and didn’t bother finding out what they meant. I suppose there’s another option (c) where they fall victim to the musical mondegreen. Here are some mishearings I’ve found on the web:

1. Just like the old man / Who’s been hit by an apple core!
2. Just let me, don’t mend it, let put by nectar cup
3. Just like the old man who / Got bit by an apricot
4. Just like the old man in that book by now because!

Last comment: The unabridged audiobook of Lolita, read by Jeremy Irons who had just played Humbert Humbert in the latest film adaptation, is just stunning. Probably my favorite audio novel. Irons is even better at reading the book than he is in the movie.

To close, I’ll give you the great opening passage of this great novel:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

(Lolita, Part I, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955.)