Eleven people have reviewed a bar named after a number with two decimal places, and the Prat has questions
Bar 182.52.
Not Bar 182. Not Bar 182 and a half. One hundred and eighty-two point five two.
Eleven people have reviewed it and given it a 5.0, which as we have now said approximately twenty times across two surveys means nothing whatsoever – and we are not going to pretend otherwise merely because the name is interesting.
The number
We have thought about this a great deal.
It is not a street number, because street numbers do not have decimals. It is not a year. It is not a price. It is not, as far as we can establish, a coordinate, a frequency, a date, or a measurement of anything obvious.
It has the specific quality of a figure that means something very precise to one person and nothing at all to anybody else – a rent, a debt, a distance, a bank balance on a significant day.
And that is either the most private and rather touching name in this entire survey, or somebody typed it wrong once and it has been there ever since.
The taxonomy is now complete
Two hundred and fifty-four articles, two postcodes, and we can now state the full range of what a British drinking establishment may be called.
The heraldic: the White Swan, the Sun in Splendour, the Pelican, the Mitre. The commemorative: the Wellington, the Marquis, the Earl of Lonsdale. The mythological: the Elephant and Castle. The descriptive: the Cock and Bottle, the Brewmaster, the Round House. The phantom: Theodore Bullfrog. The corporate: Inda Pubs Ltd. The corrupted: Te lion y unicorn. The typographic: Cepage[s], with brackets. The possessive: Larry’s, Gloria, Manolo, Angie.
And now the numeric, with a decimal point, which we did not see coming.
Why names have stopped meaning things
Because every word in the English language is taken.
We said it at Seventy5th in Covent Garden, which has a digit where a letter should be because the correctly spelled version was registered by somebody else, and it is true here.
A new venue must find a name that is available as a domain, as a handle, and as a trademark. The pool of real words is exhausted. So you get misspellings, you get abstractions, you get brackets, and eventually you get a number with two decimal places.
The Institute for Nominal Exhaustion in Erith predicts that within a decade the majority of new London bars will be named after strings that have never appeared in any language.
Verdict
Eleven reviews. We cannot tell you anything.
Numbers as names
There is a small tradition here and it is worth noting.
Bar 190 is in this same file. Seventy5th is in Covent Garden. 1871 Bar is a few streets away. 3 Henrietta Street is named after its own address.
A number is a very confident thing to call a venue, because it withholds. It tells you nothing and it implies that you ought to already know – which is precisely the emotional effect that every velvet rope in this city is engineered to produce, achieved for free, with a typeface.
The Institute for Nominal Exhaustion in Erith has noted that the decimal point represents a genuine escalation and has asked to be kept informed.
Verdict
Eleven reviews. We cannot tell you anything.
Go, and ask them what the number means, and write to us, because it is the last unsolved question in either survey.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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