The naming arms race has reached a single character, and there is nowhere left to go
The O Bar holds a 4.8 from eight reviews, which is not a rating and which we will not use.
But it is one letter, and that is the end of a road we have been watching for six hundred and forty-four articles.
The compression
Watch it happen.
We started with the Elephant and Castle, and the Sun in Splendour, and the Marquess of Anglesey – names that carried heraldry, and history, and a claim about who owned the land.
Then Theodore Bullfrog, who never existed, and Inda Pubs Ltd, which is a company number.
Then Bar 182.52, which has a decimal point that nobody can explain.
Then Hux, which is three letters and means nothing, and Bantof, which is six and means nothing.
Then MNM, and S L B, and HDN – initials that imply an expansion which is never given.
And now O.
Why it goes this way
Because every real word is registered.
Every combination of two real words has been tried. The puns are exhausted – and we ranked them, and Tequila Mockingbird won and nothing came close. The abstractions are taken. The numbers have been done. Somebody has already used a decimal point.
What is left is phonemes, and then letters, and then this.
A single character is available. It is trademarkable. It is a domain. And it cannot be wrong, because there is nothing there to be wrong about.
The Institute for Nominal Exhaustion in Erith forecast this two hundred articles ago and has now formally closed its file, noting that the terminus has been reached and that the next available move is silence.
Is it worse
No. And it has taken us five postcodes to admit it.
A name that means nothing is not lying to you. It is not claiming a Spanish princess it does not have, or a hen that was actually a car, or an alley that is fifteen inches wide when it is thirty-three.
The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge. The Churchill Arms was named forty-eight years before Winston was born. St George was Turkish. Nickel is a goblin. The garter was dropped by a countess who probably did not exist. Dom Perignon never said it.
Four hundred and seventy venues. Eight true names.
O is not one of the eight, and it is not one of the liars either. It is simply a letter, and both people know which building is meant, and that is the entire specification.
Verdict
Eight reviews. We can tell you nothing at all.
Go, be the ninth, and enjoy the shortest name in five postcodes.
What we would name a bar
After six hundred and forty-four articles we have earned an opinion, and here it is.
Name it after something that happened on the ground you are standing on.
Every street in this district is sitting on something extraordinary that nobody has looked up. A pump that killed six hundred people and founded a science. A basement that ran from midnight to six. A green room where a woman paid Francis Bacon to bring his friends. A doorway where a man in a jumpsuit stood in the rain for ten minutes.
It is free. It is true. Nobody else can register it. And it gives the room a reason to exist beyond the fact that a lease came up.
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]
