20 August 2009

Offered without comment...


The blue-coloured seats are nearly twice as wide as normal chairs and can support even the bulkiest passenger up to 550lbs without breaking. But baffled underground bosses in Sao Paulo, Brazil say they're being ignored by obese passengers, who they think are to ashamed to use them. A sign above each seat shows a cartoon of a roly-poly passenger saying "Priority chair for obese people." "It may be that they don't want to think of themselves as fat or they resent being put in with pensioners and the disabled," said one manager.
Via Fark.

Per a link in A. Fischer's comment, it appears that one politically correct term for obesity is that of being a "person of size."

4 comments:

  1. hey don't want to think of themselves as fat or they resent being put in with pensioners and the disabled
    Yet they would probably be the first to complain about the lack of accomodation if there were none.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yet they would probably be the first to complain about the lack of accomodation if there were none.

    Naw they wouldn't want to bring attention to their problem. It would be everyone else complaining about all the broken seats.

    I did just have a somewhat odd experience selling a kitchen table and chairs via craigslist along these lines. I got a call from a prospective buyer who began by asking a lot of questions about the construction of the chairs and their age. I answered as best I could but I didn't really know what he was getting at. Finally he just said "I need to know if they are sturdy because I weigh about 400 pounds." He ended up not buying them because they were similar in construction to chairs he had that had broken. I wonder if there are furniture makers that specialize in this kind of thing... and what do you know?

    ReplyDelete
  3. person of size? so size now means large? then what about all those people of short stature?

    We say tall people have "stature" when we should say "tall stature" since stature it self in theory does not mean small or large. But it's beocme tall by default.

    So now you appropriate "size" to be "large" by default.

    Can't short thin people get a break? do you need to steal the whole language?

    ReplyDelete
  4. "so size now means large?"

    Size has always meant "large", though it's typically the second definition for the noun. A "sizable" fortune is understood to be a large one.

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...