ladyofastolat: (sneezing lion)
ladyofastolat ([personal profile] ladyofastolat) wrote2015-01-09 09:25 am
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The House of Many Cars

I registered my Nectar card online yesterday, to open up the possibility of earning points on online shopping. It asked me to answer a few optional lifestyle questions, one of which was, "how many cars are there in your household?" The default answer was 7, and the drop-down list went from 1 to 9, followed by 10+.

Is this some aspirational thing? "Use Nectar vouchers to get 20p off a pint of milk, and you, too, will soon be able to run an entire fleet of shiny Jaguars!"

I wonder if anyone - anyone who shops at Sainsburys, anyway - has 10+ cars.

[identity profile] jane-somebody.livejournal.com 2015-01-23 12:54 am (UTC)(link)
My dad shops at Sainsburys, among other supermarkets, and I'm sure there have been times when he has had more than 10 cars - or at least significant parts of more than 10 cars; he used to buy them cheap and fix them up as a hobby. I remember we once swapped a cine-projector for a old VW caravanette, which I then helped him work on.

However, I admit my dad is an outlier, and that certainly doesn't explain the default being 7! (Though realistically, I suspect that is probably just a coding error.)

[identity profile] jane-somebody.livejournal.com 2015-01-23 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
('Outlier'?? That looks wrong now I've written it down, though I can't think how else it could be spelled. But looking at it makes me want to pronounce it somehow to go with Outremer...)

[identity profile] ladyofastolat.livejournal.com 2015-01-24 08:22 am (UTC)(link)
From now on, I fully intend to pronounce it to go with Outremer, too. I've always loved the word Outremer; the glamour of that word alone was what led me to choose the Crusades as my special subject for Finals.

And I think I can be fairly safe in assuming that the word "outlier" won't come up in conversation that often, so I probably won't have too many embarrassing situations in which I find myself using my deliberate, silly mispronunciation front of Important People. Um, not that this sort of thing has ever happened to me before, of course, oh no. :-D