BUCK-FITCHES., old leacherous Fellows. Nathan Bailey, Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1756)
Ahni and Zoe’s recent release of the School Rocks Fast2Fab Album highlights the colorful nature of early English. This album will shock modern school children or at least their parents. It uses portions of Nathan Bailey’s dictionary from the 1700’s for the artwork and includes the following words: lecherous, beer, murder, kill, and WHORE (twice).
BULLY-HUFF, a poor sorry Rogue, that haunts Bawdy-Houses, and pretending to get Money out of Gentlemen and other, rattling and swearing the Whore is his Wife. Nathan Bailey, Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1756)
Given some of the language children today use on the playground, perhaps English hasn’t changed that much in the past 300 years.
BUNDLE-TAIL, a short, fat, or squat Lass. Nathan Bailey, Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1756)
To Ahni and Zoe’s credit, they have resolved these “issues with artwork” by sending out replacement pages. A better solution would be to prevent the problem from happening in the first place.
If you would like to learn more early English, Google has made available the 1756 edition of the Universal Etymological English Dictionary. While this is not the edition Ahni and Zoe used, many of the same words are included with the more colorful words grouped together in the back.
All About Images Blog 
THANK YOU for covering this story! AZ should be ashamed, not just for their lax quality control (seen elsewhere in grammar and spelling errors in marketing materials), but also for how they handled it. They were informed of this twice by email three weeks before it hit the consultant fb page. Props to them for sending replacement pages, but they failed to tell consultants anything more than “We found some artwork issues, but we’re on it!”. Consultants who didn’t see the fb page(s) could have still sold ones they had in stock, and on fb consultants who didn’t know the truth were saying to “go ahead and gift them for Christmas bc replacement pages are coming”. AZ pulled the albums off the website, but they also should have told everyone what the words were and to not sell any they had on hand. This is not a good way to build confidence and trust among a rapidly dwindling sales force and customer base. And FYI, AZ, you can still see Bull and Booze on the replacement pages.
It would be interesting to see what their consultant count is now, but home office claims they don’t have that information. This has been heartbreaking to see the demise of Creative Memories, and I think AZ could make it if they would start listening to their consultants and customers: return to ISO standards of quality, improve your editing, and bring back book cloth albums and blank pages and protectors.
If they had listened to consultants, not just a select few, they might not have ended up in the predicament they’re in!
Thanks for giving this wider coverage, Mark. When Amie first spotted the words and told me, we both assumed that AZ would immediately notify consultants about the issue and urge them not to sell ANY of them. That’s what would have happened 10 years ago when I first became a consultant. So sad. – Fawn
As always, Mark, Spot on!
Admittedly, this is a very unfortunate situation, however, one must use a magnifying glass or put one’s nose next to the paper to see some of these words. They are also done in font clouds, which makes it even more difficult to see…and, furthermore, they are background mats, which, when covered with the photos meant to be there, would be barely discernible as complete words. Again, the whole situation is regrettable, but, once again, is being so totally blown out of proportion.
The fact that they are there is unacceptable. Sorry but AZCM doesn’t get a “buy” on this one.
It seems so odd that this would turn up on a scrapbook page. Makes me wonder who was responsible for the design elements on this album and if they still work for the company, or if we are looking at a disgruntled employee situation?
I think your spot on with the disgruntled part, but the designer might not be an employee of A&Z or older one of CM. My mom was commissioned by CM years ago to design one of their paper packs. She told me “What they offered to pay me wouldn’t be worth the time I would spend working on the designs.” Fortunately for her, she wasn’t hurting for cash, so she turned down the offer, but I wonder if the designer of this album didn’t have that luxury. If he/she didn’t, that image/pages selection might have been on purpose. this so reminds reminds me of the DCWV incident/rumor I heard where their Asian/oriental stack had hateful and distasteful Chinese characters on one of their page designs.
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