It’s time for today’s Retail Tale of Horror! A lady rang up this morning asking if I could put aside two balls of Heirloom wool for her. Sure, what colour is it? “Nigger.” Excuse me? “Nigger.” I incredulously told her that the Heirloom wool doesn’t have names, only numbers, and that I wasn’t sure which colour she was talking about. I directed her to the website to have a look and she dutifully rang me back five minutes later. “It’s colour 717,” she said. “The very dark brown.” Of course it is, madam. Where do these people come from?!
Important Note
This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.
Comments
6 responses to “Very Dark Brown”
What the … that’s so … “????”
Any chance you can ban this woman from the store, preferably from the planet?
OH MY GOODNESS!!
I can’t beleive people would actually still think that this type of language is acceptable!!!!
Ooooh… Hall of Shame for that woman!!
I was trying to justify it afterwards, like maybe I misheard her or she was a non-native speaker… but no, I’m pretty sure. I just don’t get where she got it. That brand of yarn doesn’t do colour names. So either she got the name off a pattern or the place where she bought it, or she just invented it herself.
It was a very common way to describe very dark brown a few years ago. I’m not sure that ‘nigger’ was ever such a common term of abuse here as it was in the US. But it’s certainly not acceptable now!
Hi,
I know this is a really old post, but I came across it when looking for some references to heirloom patons wool. I picked up a patons booklet today at the op shop. I’d say it’s circa 1950s. It has a men’s fair isle vest in it, using Patons beehive fingering 4 ply which I hadn’t heard of before. The colours are listed and it includes a dark brown colour that is called “nigger”. I really had to look twice (and I’m a historian!) Maybe that’s where this query was coming from, a similar old pattern?