Michael Toolan
Joke shop names
Why does an ordinary suburban laundry call itself
Soap Opera ? Why does a
local hairdressers announce itself as Snip Joint
? What motivates these playful namings, and do they reflect a shift in
societal attitudes to language, laundries and hairdressers? This paper examines
a range of ‘joke shop names’ of the kind found on many contemporary British high
streets (as elsewhere), and offers a commentary on their linguistic structure,
semantic tendencies, as well as suggesting some of their interpersonal functions
and effects. Such names enact or perform difference; for joke shop name
establishments, the naming asserts and demonstrates that the proprietor and
perhaps the staff, the modus operandi, the ambience, the treatment of customers,
and so on, are non-standard by the expectations of normal mainstream businesses.
Among other claims, I propose that joke shop names are almost the opposite of
the processes of image-conscious logo-fashioning, the branding and re-branding
of businesses, organizations and institutions that seems to be particularly
actively pursued at present, driven by competitive and often globalizing
forces.
Journal of Literary Semantics, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0341-7638
Volume: 34, 10/2005
Pages: 165 - 179
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