Simon De Montfort, having been defeated and killed by Royalists, his body mutilated and his extremities distributed among his enemies as trophies, faces the final indignity: T.K. Maxx. Leicester, April 2017.
This will cause an extra parallel-universe cognitive glitch for my American friends, and I am excited for that to happen here
I’m amused to see Elodie’s addition, because yes, that is exactly what happened.
(Me, upon seeing this picture: ”–wait what? What???”
Me, upon scrolling down just enough to see the original caption: “You mean that’s not even what the picture is supposed to be about?”)
But why would they even–
‘The company modified the name to T.K. Maxx to avoid “confusion with the established British retail chain T J Hughes (which is not affiliated with TJX)“‘
Ah, okay.
(…wait, but if it’s not called that in Britain, why is there a bit in a Jasper Fforde book that goes like this:
“You imprisoned her in a clothing store?”
“It’s not really a clothing store; that’s just the cover story. Temporal Jail, Maximum Security. Didn’t you ever wonder why it was called TJ Maxx?”)
Because the rest of that acronym was “Temporal-J Maximum Security.” I always wondered why the “J” didn’t stand for anything!
And of course it would be entirely on-theme for a Thursday Next book to have editions with slightly different text.
>>And of course it would be entirely on-theme for a Thursday Next book to have editions with slightly different text.<<
Yeah, I wondered if maybe that just wasn’t in the original, but I’m not sure how cleanly you could excise the TJ Maxx joke given that a plot conversation takes place there. Was Aornis stuck at the checkout of a different store in the original, possibly one with an impenetrably British joke? (But a reference being impenetrably obscure has never stopped Jasper Fforde before.)
Does anyone have a British copy of First Among Sequels they can check?
—
>>I always wondered why the “J” didn’t stand for anything!<<
I did some Googling and at first it looked like you were thinking of a bit in The Woman Who Died A Lot, which I haven’t read yet. I was thinking of First Among Sequels.
But then I went and looked at my copy of First Among Sequels, and that doesn’t specify what the J stands for, either.
I mean, I might have just filled it in from context, but it kind of looks like we have a Berenstain situation on our hands in more ways than one.
It could be the same store; they’d just have to make it “Temporal-K” instead. Having a letter that doesn’t stand for anything is inelegant, but if he knew it was going to have to make sense on our side of the Atlantic…
Or maybe the K did stand for something and the translators had to just cut out the joke.
#berenstjin
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#(May 2017) #conversational aglets #unreality cw #Thursday Next
Brinens and Things 
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