Elvis lives ... and now he's selling motor insurance; CD-WOW ruling online

Absolutely astounded by the riddle of the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society, the IPKat now thinks he has a solution. Today's Telegraph reports that the 160-year old society, one of the largest insurance, asset management and banking groups in the UK, has jettisoned its crusty old monicker "Liverpool Victoria" in favour of LV= (see logo, above left). The riddle is this: how is 'LV=' pronounced? There may be some languages in which the '=' sign is articulated as a vowel or consonant, but English is not one of them.

At first the Kat hypothesised that LV= would be pronounced as written, eg. "ellvee-equals". Then a brilliant idea struck him. When he was but a little Kit at primary school, he and his classmates had to chant their multiplication tables: "1 x 3 = 3, 2 x 3 = 6, 3 x 3 = 9 ...", and so on -- and the '=' bit was always rendered "is" (eg 3 x 3 = 9 would be chanted as "three times three is nine"). Consider this. If "L" is pronounced "ell", the "V" is articulated as the normal "v" sound, as in 'very' or 'vixen' and the '=' is rendered as is, you get "ell" + "v" + "is", which is "Elvis". QED.

Merpel is unimpressed by this startling deduction. It’s obvious, she says, that the logo reads like the word “love” but with the ‘o’ —pronounced “love” in tennis scoring—strategically omitted. This is because there’s no love lost between motorists and the insurance companies which they regard as hitching a free ride on their disposable income.

Elvis here
Alvis here
Elvis sightings here
Loch Ness Monster sightings here
Another silly green British insurance company logo with an unpronounceable symbol in the middle of it here


The travails of the music consumer’s self-appointed friend CD-WOW were noted briefly by the IPKat here yesterday. The full text of the judgment of Mr Justice Evans-Lombe in Independiente and others v Music Trading On-Line (HK) Ltd and others [2007] EWHC 533 (Ch) is now available here on BAILII. It’s well worth a read, particular on the arguments relating to the alleged applicability of the Sale of Goods Act 1979 to online purchases made by European customers on non-EU websites.