It Is Now That We Are Laughing At The Humour, Is It?

I see from another website and our own ordering department that those fun-lovin' folks at Zeiss have introduced some new lenses.

I'm a great Zeiss fan - got a set of them on my Hasselblad 500 cameras and I note that you can get them for all sorts of cameras these days - Nikon, Canon, Leica, Voigtländer...Well now you can also get them for Fuji X-series and Sony E mount.

Yowza - all good news. Particularly good news for the Fuji people as it indicates that their mount is opening up to the other suppliers in the market. You can't decry the factory Fuji lenses, but it is nice to contemplate a whole new stream of other glass to experiment with.

The new lenses are 12mm and 32mm and come with removable lens hoods. They are reported to be well-built and reasonably light for pro glass.

The part that gave rise to the heading image is the names. The lenses are the Touits.

I checked up with my on-line dictionary to see if a touit was something noble in the German language. Or scientific. So far my investigations have not turned up anything...leaving me to fall back on the old joke about doing something when you get a round touit...

This seems a great deal more vulgar levity than normal from a major lens manufacturer, either in Germany or Japan. They might caper about in masks at Fasching or the Hello Kitty Festival but they generally don't extend to cross-cultural puns. I suspect I have missed something somewhere and need to search further for an explanation.

If it just turns out to be someone in the advertising office drinking at lunchtime - and remember that is what gave us the 1974 VW Passat - we can only hope that the excellence of the lenses and the overweening dignity of the Zeiss name will prevail. I should put a bit of gaffer tape over the name on the lens if were using one - that or be prepared to laugh at the same joke a thousand times.