Names to amuse

Long term readers will know I have a penchant for unusual names of all sorts. I love the quirkiness of oddball celebrity names for their kids which I wrote about ages ago in baby names. Things have continued bonkers-wise with Sam Worthingon’s kid Rocket Zot and Uma Thurman’s hardly under-christened daughter Rosalind Arusha Arkadina Altalune Florence. A very early posting covered off some unlikely car naming policy on behalf of the big car companies which continues to this day with the Renault Kadjar and the Skoda Karoq. Krikey! Later I enjoyed recalling some of the more amusing drag names  spotted in a publicity sign for a Brighton bar and I then revelled in some names from recent series of Ru Paul’s Drag Race with such classics as Baga Chipz and Bimini Bon Boulash. Now that’s magic. One of my favourite weird naming postings was the very odd place names that exist in Britain like Stratton Strawless, Boggy Bottom and Droop. Thinking about it they could very well become a few of the names of next year’s Drag Race contestants ha! After reading Bill Bryson’s ‘Notes from a Small Island’ and his rather disappointing ‘The Road to Little Dribbling’, I thought between us we’d covered off all the quirky hamlet/village/town names worth having fun with.

But not quite. A little while ago I was watching one of those after News weather reports on BBC tv and it had a picture taken from one of the viewers of a local scene, taken at some place called Plenploth. Plenploth! It’s not far removed from Plinky Plonk which sounds like one of the Teletubbies. I reckon I’ve heard most town name derivations in the UK and this came as a complete surprise. It doesn’t sound old English, Viking, Norman, Celtic, Roman nor Medieval. I did some research and it took some finding. It’s not so much a settlement as a Manor House with large gardens near Galashiels in Scotland.  And obviously it was christened by the guy who created/founded it because it reminded them of plenty of moths? I don’t know. What a weird frigging name. Do you know of a more unlikely-sounding place name?

Way back I also did a small posting on amusing shop names, which I should have added to over the years. The best were outrageous puns like The Codfather fish and chip shop etc.  I got a bit close to it with my recent posting on Stratford upon Avon B&B guest houses many of which have cringey and unimaginative Shakespearean names like Cymbeline House. But my eyes were drawn to a new shoe shop opening on Stratford’s main thoroughfare shortly. I’ll add a picture below just to prove that I’m telling the truth. But if I asked you to come up with a punny Shakespearean name for a shoe shop you couldn’t do much worse than this…

 

In case you can’t quite read it the shop’s name is ‘Much a Shoe About Nothing’. Sigh. I suppose it’s marginally better than ‘The Eyes are the window to your sole’.

Old Wille must be spinning as I write

pp

 

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