In the next town over there is a secondhand store, run by a church I believe, with the name “Thrift On By.”
This name irritates the hell out of me. Every time I see it I wince. Then I try to put it out of my mind, but a mile or so down the road the name comes back and I wince all over again. Some days I wince all the way home.
The thing is, there’s no rationale to explain just why I find the name so awful. Okay, it’s overly cute, and it seems like someone was trying too hard to come up with something original. Then again, “Thrift On By” is at least somewhat descriptive, and cutesy names for hair saloons and the like don’t seem to bother me all that much; and not all thrift stores can or should be called “Secondhand Rose” or “The Thrift Shop Run By The Ladies Of The Third Baptist Church.” Still! I feel all bothered just typing the name.
Best Buy. It is so non-descriptive that I had no idea what kind of store it was for several years. I have since become a customer, but I still don’t like the name.
We have one nearby called “Thai Coon”. I don’t like that name on many levels. It’s either implicative of being somewhat racist, or that they serve roadkill, not sure which is worse.
Anything that changes initial letters for an alliteration, like Frank’s Fotomat, or Kountry Kitchen, but especially when you didn’t need to change anything, because you already had an alliteration, but you did anyway like Selebration Sereals. Also, anything called “Ye Olde” whatever, and anything with an unnecessary apostrophe, like “Sarah Pastrie’s.”
Also, a place on Indy far East central, called D&C Pizza.
A new retirement home just opened up in my neighborhood and it’s called “Vista Springs.”
It’s just supposed to be a boring, nice-sounding name for a place. Heck, I suppose it means “life spring,” hooray for them. But it just seems so out of place and silly for my little midwestern town. I honestly feel like it would be much better as “MyTown Old Folks Home” or something.
I think I kind of have a chip on my shoulder with regards to all of the old people facilities cropping up in my town recently. Vista Springs is the one I have to drive by every day, though.
There was an apartment complex I used to drive by named “Hunting Woods.” Yay, what a place to live. Making it worse was that the script font made it look like “Hurting Woods,” which is an even more lovely image and sounds like a spinoff of Dawson’s Creek.
There was a Brake Shoppe, which scored a double because (1) I don’t want quaint old brake repairs, thanks and (2) their slogan, a permanent part of their professionally made sign, was “Integrity is our Service.”
Any business that’s Shoppe or has a superfluous e - a wannabetrendy corner mall was Quail Pointe, which we always pronounced “pointy” as we do “shoppy.” Yes, there were shoppys in the pointy.
There is a place on Broadway, in Vancouver BC that advertises “Fresh Food”. All about how fresh their soup and sandwiches and baking and coffee is so fresh."
It is called “Deja Brew”
That drives me nuts. This is Canada too, so many people have at least a smattering of French. I’m fluent, Ricky Nelson Muntz is bilingual with French as his first language.
I stumbled across Vom Fass Oils. Firefox blocked me from the company’s website, saying it wasn’t secure, but I’ve seen an actual Vom Fass store, so it’s real.
“Use our olive oils and Vomit Fast” is the obvious slogan.
It’s semi-anecdotal, but I think it was Elaine Boosler who said she saw a pastries store named Bonjour Croissant, and she wanted to go to Paris and open one called Hello Toast.
I am annoyed by most dot-com names that are (or appear to be) the soulless products of focus groups picking from available combinations of letters. Trivago and Zoosk, you’re at the top of that list. I understand why this kind of naming is essential for success and it still annoys me.
Anything along the lines of “Bargain Barn”, “Outlet”, or “Liquidators”. You KNOW their stuff is not a bargain but likely cheap junk meant to be foisted onto uneducated poor people.
I’ve seen a funeral home, part of a chain I think, called Mourning Glory. In my universe, cutesy puns and grief don’t belong together. I can imagine the funeral director greeting a bereaved client: “Good mourning. Get it? Ha ha ha.”
In the biotech industry, almost every major company has Gen (as in genetics) in its name. There are Biogen, Amgen, Genentech, Genzyme, and several others I can’t recall right now. It’s impossible to keep any of them straight.
