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September 18, 2005
Baby store
I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but sometimes I'll look at a word I've read fifty thousand times before and suddenly it just seems wrong. In a book I recently read, I came to a stop at the word, infantry, and if it didn't jump off the page and slap me in the face. I had to go so far as open my spell checker in MS Word to be certain it was spelled right--and certainly enough, it was!
From the looks of this Japanese ad,
blond haired, blue eyed babies are a
big seller in Tokyo!But if you didn't know what infantry meant, it would seem to mean “childish behaviour” in the same sense as gallantry is the act of being gallant. Or worse yet, like you'll find baked goods at a bakery, infantry could mean a store that sells babies (The French could have, perhaps, an Enfenterie, commes la Poissonerie). Or, heaven forbid, like hosery and finery, infantry could literally mean “infants meant to be worn.”
English is certainly a weird language.
Posted by Bastique at September 18, 2005 5:11 PM