13 December 2005

WHOA! Major English Blunder...

HOLY SMOKES! I can't believe that I only noticed this for the first time today. I had just hopped a bus when one of the GIANT signs caught the corner of my eye. I returned with my camera this afternoon, not fully believing that I had actually read what I knew I had.

I've always cringed when I walked past this men's clothing store anyway. The best way to describe it is that it is a mix of all that is wrong from three different stores: it takes the insanely loud music of Abercrombie and Fitch and pipes it in over the Euro-trashy clothing that you would get if Hot Topic and Hollister were to merge.

Without further ado, this is the sign in question, just across the street from our apartment:

Yes, kids, that's the f-bomb. And it's the company's philosophy.

Once I had visual confirmation that this was actually what the sign said, I felt that it was my duty as an English-speaking citizen of the world to explain the extremely poor word choice to the good folks at Delaveine.

Then I got closer to the store.

No joke: every single item of clothing in the entire store has a six-inch-long pricetag with this slogan on it. Even if I were to explain it to them, what could they do? Cut the pricetag off of everything in their store? So, I judged this to be an unsaveable mess, and went on my merry way.

I guess you can file this under "things you wouldn't see in the US" ... or at the very least, "Things you wouldn't see in the US for very long because people would protest."

Postscript: The longer I thought about this, the more I have become convinced that A) the guys who came up with this ad campaign knew full-well what that word meant, and B) they were just hoping for attention.

1 Comments:

At 14/12/05 02:27, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amy, I am sure they deliberately used the word on the sign. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall if you would've nonchalantly explained to the Eurotrash behind the counter that you were a native speaker of English and they had really mistakenly used a poorly-chosen word on all of their advertisements. Even though it is France and many people don't speak English, I am pretty sure most people and especially most Eurotrash people know what the word fuck means. Now I wish I had a shirt from that store.

 

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