I’d Like A Marquis de Sade Diaper Pail, Please

While the headline is certainly foolish, it is, in a sense, beggared by the reality of a recent parent/employee skirmish at Woolworths in the United Kingdom.

According to The Times, the trouble began when a mom noticed that Woolworths was advertising a bedroom set as “The Lolita Sleeper Combi.” It was “a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about 6,” and on sale on the Woolworths Web site for £395.

The mother in question raised the alarm on a UK parenting Web site, where she said: “Am I being particularly sensitive, or does anyone else out there think it’s bad taste for Woolies to have a kiddy bed range named ‘Lolita’?.”

Other parents did not think she was being overly sensitive and several complained to the store, much to Woolworths staff’s confusion:

Whereas many mothers were familiar with Vladimir Nabokov and his famous novel, it seems that the Woolworths staff were not. At first they were baffled by the fuss. A spokesman for the company told The Times: “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. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

I guess.

And Lisa Lim, a spokesperson for Woolworths told AP on Sunday that she didn’t see what all the fuss was about:

“There aren’t many people in the company, in the whole world, who know about the ‘Lolita’ book or films,” Lim said. “There might be a few people in the country who have a problem with it, but it’s just a name.”

And now it’s just a name of a product that’s been pulled.

Maybe the moral of the story needs to be, if you’re going to name stuff for a living -- especially stuff to be aimed at little kids -- you need to be well read enough to get when you’re making literary references. Or something.

The Times piece is here.

(Tip of the hat to Petrona.)