Not So Dumb After All

It's things like this that make me feel as if my prep school education wasn't a total waste...other than advance algebra which WAS a total waste, in my case at least. We were exposed to a great deal of knowledge which goes unnoticed (apparently) today. Recently, I was conversing with one of the students whom (not "who") I tutor about a selection of "The Iliad" which she had to read for a class. She was having some difficulty keeping Achilles and Agamemnon separate. Oh, I know, a LOT of people have that difficulty, but this young person happened to come into college as a freshman with 25 college credits already earned...yet, she had never been exposed to Homer and, in fact, could not even tell me which tomes of classic literature she HAD read in high school...a mere 10 months earlier! Wow!
Now comes this from England: Woolworth's stores there were advertising a bedroom set for young girls called "The Lolita Midsleeper Combi Bedroom Set." A parents' group called Raisingkids called and issued a strong complaint about the use of the name "Lolita." Lisa Lim, a spokesperson for the company, issued this statement: "There aren't many people in the company, in the whole world, who know about the book or the films made of it."
Is this just because she was born post-1955 when Nabokov wrote the book? Could she have missed the two film versions; the latest in 1997 starred Jeremy Irons? Probably our for some fish and chips that year. Humber Humbert would be dismayed to find that he is irrelevant in England in the 21st century.
I suspect we all will be sooner or later, but in the meantime, I can feel smugly superior because I knew all about Lolita (not that we were allowed to read it, mind you...I just knew!)