The front of the shirt reads, “ghotic,” written in a font befitting the dust jacket of an Anne Rice novel. Down the sleeves and on the back there is a stupefying message, intended, I’m sure, to be mystifying or even dreadful and chilling:

This shirt, found at outdoor markets around southern Poland, is all the rage at the moment. It seems that at least thirty percent of the girls at school have one.

It seems strange that manufacturers want to incorporate “cool” foreign languages into their design, but “cool” text with such idiotic mistakes defeats the purpose. Why not just put gibberish on shirts if comprehensible meaning has no value? Why not put some squiggles and dots and call it Arabic? Or go to a Chinese language website and pick some of the characters at random?

This is the story of our times, when style consistently trumps content. Image is everything. First impressions are almost always visible, and pop culture is always dictating in which form the initial impressions should be in order to be considered “good.” Or even “cool.” That explains why so many of my female students wear clothes that bare their midriffs even when there’s a half meter of snow on the ground, and pluck their eyebrows within a millimeter of extinction. Chinese culture crippled its women with foot binding; Polish culture freezes them and has them running around with nonsense written on their clothes.