NZ Visual Diary - entry 137

The Rock Shop - K Road

I was back home visiting my parents during a break from college. My father and I were heading to the store together and, as he got into the car, my father picked up the book I had left in the passenger seat - the Collected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (English translation).

“You should read them in French, hear how the bon mot sounds, how it rolls off the tongue in the mother language.”

My father was a linguistic gymnast, a virtuoso of the spoken word in at least 2 romance languages, Portuguese, German, Yiddish and Hebrew.

He had properly read Baudelaire.

A fellow master of the bon mot, my father brokered his talents in creative advertising. He was not only a lover of languages and literatures, he also enjoyed the good (and not so good) pun. He simply loved playing with words - transposing sound and meaning.

So, it came as no surprise when I saw the store display captured in this entry’s image that I thought of my father: “Back to Class Essentials” as the advertising campaign of a music shop to mark the opening of a new school year.

He would have enjoyed the clever play on context, the transposition of the familiar.

This one’s for you, Harry.