From the annals of remarkable names

(This is a brief not-dead-yet posting, also an attempt to hack away at the avalanche of things to post about that confronted me when I arose — at 2:30 am, which for me is a reasonable time.)

An old One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed this morning. With a remarkable name — but one concocted by the cartoonist to achieve a terrible pun.


(#1) Creighton is a real, but rare, FN (a LN converted to use as a FN); and Barrel is a real, but rare, LN, introduced in panel 1 of the strip; put them together and, in panel 4, you’ve got Creighton Barrel, which is Rick Detorie’s fictive remarkable name, an outrageous pun

Yes, the upscale housewares and furniture store Crate & Barrel; with the unaccented and of crate and pronounced as a syllabic n (as it usually is in connected speech), crate ‘n barrel and Creighton Barrel are homophonous.

As for the store, here’s the one in Stanford Shopping Center, up the road a bit from my house:


(#2) A fanciful shot from the site of the structural engineering firm RMJ & Associates that designed the building

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