The Ecphorizer

The Observatory Issue 8
Tod Wicks

Issue #08 (April 1982)



The other day I happened to drive past a building under construction in the middle of Silicon Valley and noticed that the contractor had erected a sign which proclaimed the building to be a new restaurant named "The Lion and Compass." Now, I have seen some interesting names of eateries in my time, like The Red Lion, The Cork and Cleaver and The Bloated Boar. There seems to be a whole genre of restaurant managers who feel that stringing together unrelated words will create a name which will be at the tip of everyone's tongue. These combinations usually include the names of animals, tools of the culinary art, the shipbuilding trade or winemaking, and occasionally a color.

This got the old gears turning as I sat at the next signal. Why not devise a table of words and offer it to prospective restaurateurs through which they can create clever and catchy names. Here follows a list of my suggestions. If anyone uses any of these words and turns them into a moneymaking operation, please contact my Financial Advisor to arrange royalty payments. To make any sense of the table below, one need only take a word from any column and combine it with a word from any other column by separating the two with the symbol " 'n," as in "Rack 'n Pinion." To be really clever, add your favorite color.
Brass Rail
Monkey
Hound
Dog
Mutt
Lion
Rabbit
Hatchet
Pig
Ship
Bull
Stag
Head
Gut
Chopstick
Tit
Pot


Of course, for the computer nuts who expand their horizons beyond hacking to open digital delis, the list might be like this:

 Disk Drive
Floppy
Byte
Monitor
Modem
Nibble
Garbage
Dump


Naturally, this could be done for other specialties and ethnic persuasions. Interesting lists from readers will result in glory through publication. The cleverest will have a month added to his/her subscription to THE ECPHORIZER. . 


Tod has just redone his home computer room adding new equipment and programs.  When he fires it up, lights all over town dim.

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Contributor Profile

Tod Wicks

Long time Ecphorizer and current Editor of all things Ecphorizer, Tod enjoyed a varied career in telecommunications having cut his teeth at Ma Bell, then getting in on the ground floor at Rolm working on digital PBXs, getting a light workout at Raynet while installing fiber optic transmission systems, and finally working at Cisco Systems prior to retiring.