Would you buy a dress from a barn or a pita from a pit?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Names for things like brands, and titles for speeches matter. On August 6, 2023 I blogged about Brand names and changes. In that post I discussed a local restaurant which had changed its name from Bad Boy Burger to Cowboy Burger.

 

At the Boise Public Library I found a 2011 book by Christopher Johnson titled MICROSTYLE The Art of Writing Little. Mr. Johnson has a PhD in linguistics and is a verbal branding consultant. On page 99 he discusses the women’s clothing stores known as Dressbarn:

 

“So what’s a bad metaphor? One that either leads to undesirable inferences, or fails to illuminate the target. Undesirable inferences emanate from the retail outlet name The Dress Barn. This name treats a store, metaphorically, as a place that houses animals. Questions immediately arise: Are the animals the dresses or the customers? Certainly no dress shopper wants to be described as a cow, horse, goat, or pig. Nor does one want to be wearing a barn animal, or a dress as big as a barn. Barns are about as far from the urbane world of fashion as a place can get, and they stink. The name The Dress Barn is a metaphorical travesty.”

 

The Wikipedia article about Dressbarn says all 650 of their stores closed on December 26, 2019.

 

At the bottom of page 99 Mr. Johnson discusses how:

 

“Another bad metaphor name is The Pin Cushion, for an acupuncture clinic in Seattle. We stick pins into pincushions carelessly. Pins don’t even have to be very sharp to go into a pincushion. What the names in this case were going for, presumably, was an image of relaxation: the logo shows a human figure lying back on a pillow, Instead they created an image of carelessness.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pita Pit is a franchise sandwich chain that I don’t patronize. As shown above, I would not buy a pita from a pit. A humorous YouTube video clip from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight discussed finding a sandwich in a hole. And last year John did a whole 27-minute show on another sandwich franchise chain named after something underground – Subway.

 

The cartoon of a barn came from Openclipart; the painting of a pit was edited from this altarpiece image at Wikimedia Commons.