Hair salons with puns for names

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found three funny articles about hair salons whose names are puns. One is by Jess Zimmermam at Atlas Obscura on September 30, 2015 and titled Hair They Are, the Punniest Salon Names in America. A second is at the Meh.com/Forum on October 23, 2018 and titled Hair places often have some of the worst (read:best) pun-tastic names. The following are all real. What’s your favorite? An undated third at DaySmart salon is The 23 Funniest Hair Salon Names. An alphabetical merged list of them is:

 

Anita Haircut

 

Barberella

Best Little Hair House

Bush Wacker

A Breath of FresHair

 

Clip Art

Combing Attractions

Curl Up and Dye

Cut and Dry

 

Deja Do

Do or Dye

Dye Pretty

 

Family Ahair

Finger Bang

From Hair to Eternity

 

Grateful Dreads

The Grateful Head

 

Hair Force One

Hair Today Dye Tomorrow

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

Hair We Go!

Hairitage

Hairport

Hairphernalia

Hairatics Dye for Your Beliefs

Hannah and Her Scissors

 

Jack of All Fades

Jack the Clipper

Julius Scissor

 

Lice Knowing You

Lunatic Fringe

 

The Mane Tamer

Mullet Over

 

Nail Me Good

 

Scissors Palace

Shear Delight

Shear Destiny

Shear Lock Combs

Shear Madness

Shear Perfection

Snip Doggy Dog

Snip Tease

 

The Tortoise and the Hair

Turn Your Head and Coif

The Twisted Scissor

 

A Wild Hair

 

You Are Hair

You’ve Got Nail

 

I got started on this topic by seeing page 44 of the 2026 book by Christopher Duffy titled Humor Me: How laughing more can make you present, creative, connected, and happy. In a section on Looking for Laughs in All the Right Places Chris said:

 

“Once I was traveling through Maine when I passed a hair salon named Hair Force One. It was a pun so hilarious and terrible that it stopped me in my tracks. And then, over the course of the next week, I noticed more and more hair salon puns: State of Mane, Curl Up and Dye, and so many more. To me, Maine is now a state defined by business name puns so excruciating that they come back around to being amazing."

 

The hair salon cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

The Cambridge Dictionary recently added over 6,000 new words including delulu, skibidi, and tradwife

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An article by Katie Phoenix at Cambridge News on August 18, 2025 is titled Cambridge Dictionary adds skibidi, delulu and tradwife among over 6,000 new words.

 

Delulu is a Gen-Z synonym for delusional. However, as shown above it just as well could be a girl’s name derived from Delia and Lulu. Boomers like me will note that it resembles desilu. Desilu Productions, Inc. was run by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball and made the I Love Lucy TV sitcom and both The Untouchables and Mission Impossible.

 

A traditional wife is a tradwife. 

 

But skibidi is basically meaningless. It was a song back in 2018, but in 2023 showed up as part of the title to Skibidi Toilet.

 

Broligarchy is:

 

“a blend of bro and oligarchy, means ‘a small group of men, especially men owning or involved in a technology business, who are extremely rich and powerful, and who have or want political influence’.”

 

The cartoon was adapted from one on page 41 of the 1923 Cartooning Made Easy book by Charles Lederer.  

 

 

Calling the largest bedroom in a home the master bedroom now is offensive language

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preferred phrases can change over time. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a master bedroom as:

 

“a large or principal bedroom”

 

But an article by Sydney Franklin at The New York Times on August 5, 2020 is titled The Biggest Bedroom Is No Longer a ‘Master.’ Another article by Teneal Zuvela at Home beautiful on September 1, 2024 described The problematic history of the term ‘master bedroom.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merriam-Webster said master was first used a century ago. How common it was is shown above via the Google Books Ngram Viewer.

 

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine cartoon for May 27, 2025 has the following dialogue about adjectives:

 

Goat: Hey, do you want to see my new master bedroom?

 

Rat: ‘Primary’ bedroom. The word ‘master’ is offensive.

 

Goat: Primary bedroom.

 

Three students: ‘Main bedroom.’ The term ‘primary’ is offensive to primary school students.

 

Goat: I’m gonna just stop talking.

 

Rat: That probably offended someone.

 

The Simpsons fictional character Principal Seymour Skinner could object to principal bedroom.  

 

 

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.

 

Bad names for paint colors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The F Minus comic by Tony Carrillo for August 21, 2023 shows a woman looking at a wall with three paint samples and lamenting:

 

“Sigh. Well, I know which color is my favorite.

 But why did it have to be the one named ‘Moist Phlegm’?”

 

I’ve shown two other bad color names. Sam Barer’s Four Wheel Drift on September 30, 2006 is an article titled Color Me Crazy – The Best and Worst Paint Names. He says some others you won’t ever see include:

 

Yellow Snow

Blue Balls

Gang Green

High Whore Silver

Stinky Pinky

 

Sam claimed that:

 

“…in 1970 the Chrysler Corp-supported Plymouth Superbird of Charlie Glotzbach started running NASCAR’s Gran National circuit painted in the factory color Plum Crazy. A creative journalist, however, gave the color a nickname that stuck with the media for years: 'Statutory Grape'.” 

 

At Mopar Connection Magazine there is a three-minute video by Kevin Shaw titled When Plum Crazy Purple was almost Statutory Grape: Mopar Connection Shop Talk. It’s close to being a Toastmasters Tall Tale speech.

 

More about demonyms for cities - in Idaho and elsewhere

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Idaho Press and then KTVB7 there is an article by Carolyn Komatsoulis on August 7, 2023 titled Idahoans. Boiseans. Nampans? Meridianites? A hard-hitting investigation into what the Treasure Valley’s demonyms are. On January 22, 2023 I blogged about how Demonyms aren’t about demons, but they can be in Table Topics questions for Toastmasters.

 

She discusses how although we in the state capital are known as Boiseans other Treasure Valley cities are less defined. In some cases, like Boise, the demonym even is listed on the relevant Wikipedia page. Carolyn missed that Caldwell residents should quite perfectly be known as Caldwellers rather than Caldwellians.

 

Choosing a demonym requires avoiding a name that only might apply to some residents. For example, not every resident of Garden City is a Gardener. And not everyone in Horseshoe Bend is a blacksmith, so they should be Horseshoe Bendians rather than Horseshoe Benders (and that also applies for Bend, Oregon). I mentioned them earlier in my March 26, 2017 blog post titled Table Topics – What should we call people who live in that city?

 

In that post I also mentioned the problem of needing variations for -men and -women when using names ending with -man, like Hagerman (and also Lowman, Idaho or Boardman, Oregon).  

 

Residents of Oregon are called Oregonians; only those with terminal conditions can be called Oregoners.

 

Wikipedia has a page titled List of Capitals in the United  States. I used it to painlessly search a lot of the state capitals. Some are confusing, like that residents of Albany, New York are Albanians (which instead should refer to another country). That also goes for calling Phoenix residents Phoenicians. Those in Olympia, Washington likely are not athletic enough to deserve being called Olympians.  

 

Wikipedia has another page titled Provinces and territories of Canada which links to their pages for their capitals. For Nova Scotia residents of Halifax are Haligonians; Halifaxers would only refer to those who transmit information via fax. The capital of Quebec is Quebec City, so residents are Québécois de Québec. The capital of British Columbia is Victoria, so their residents are Victorians. But most of us might instead think because the UK’s Queen Victoria died back in 1901 all those Victorians also should be dead. The capital of Manitoba is Winnipeg, and the residents are known as Winnipeggers. Unfortunately, there is another more recent and much ruder meaning for pegger. Pegging refers to anal sex done to a man by a woman with a strapon dildo!   

 

The image of a demon was modified from this one at Openclipart.

 

Beware of stealth fruit juices

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What a product is called may differ significantly from what it actually contains. A few days ago I bought a bottle of OceanSpray REVItALIZE Cranberry Apple flavored juice drink with 3 juices (as shown above). What is the third one? The list of ingredients on the bottle (and on the Albertsons web site) says it contains:

 

Filtered Water, Grape Juice (Water, Grape Juice Concentrate), Cranberry Juice (Water, Cranberry Juice Concentrate), Pineapple Juice (Water, Pineapple Juice Concentrate), Natural Flavor, Magnesium Gluconate (Magnesium), Vegetable Concentrate for Color, Gum Arabic, Ester Gum.

 

The second (and stealth) ingredient is grape juice, but there’s more of it than either cranberry or pineapple!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also have a can of AriZona brand ALL NATURAL Kiwi Strawberry Fruit Juice Cocktail (as shown above). The ingredients listed on that can are:

 

Filtered Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup (Glucose-Fructose Syrup), Pear Juice from Concentrate, Kiwi Juice from Concentrate, Citric Acid, Natural Flavors, Strawberry Juice from Concentrate, Fruit and Vegetable Juice for Color, Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Gum Acacia, Ester Gum, Beta Carotene for Color.

 

Here the third (and stealth) ingredient is pear juice, but there’s more of it than either kiwi or strawberry!

 

Back on November 5, 2010 I blogged about Do you like stealth raisins? In that post I discussed how my wife dislikes oatmeal cookies containing raisins, but found those just labeled oatmeal cookies had stealth raisin paste.

 

Brand names and changes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I drive west on Fairview Ave to the WinCo supermarket where I grocery shop, I pass what used to be known as Bad Boy Burgers. But an article by Autumn Robertson at Boise Dev on July 27, 2023 titled ‘Always wanted to be a cowboy’: From Bad Boy to Cowboy, Fairview burger joint changes names described how that restaurant (which used to be one of three Bad Boy Burger locations) changed - since the ownership previously had changed.

 

Anyway, Bad Boy struck me as a curious choice for a name. It’s not as awful as the mythical Bad Guy Burgers (shown above) – which could be a cue they were ‘horsing around’ with the meat.  That had happened a decade ago in Europe as described in another article by Felicity Lawrence at  The Guardian on February 15, 2023 titled Horsemeat scandal: the essential guide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, the local franchise holder for the Big Boy hamburger was called Eat’n Park. That struck me as not being in chronological order, so they could have been called Park’n Eat (as shown above). I remember that when we drove to Wheeling the franchise holder for West Virginia instead was Elby’s (for the Elias brothers). In other places it was Shoney’s or Frisch’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On April 6, 2022 I blogged about how It is easy to parody a brand name or logo. I mentioned Yellow [Freight] whose logo already was a parody because it was colored orange rather than actually being yellow. Now they instead are bankrupt. An article by Elizabeth Napolitano at CBS News on July 31, 2023 is titled Yellow is shutting down after 99 years. Here’s what happened.

 

An image of the Big Boy statue came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Demonyms aren’t about demons, but they can be in Table Topics questions for Toastmasters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might guess that demonyms are about demons, but you would be wrong. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a demonym as:   

 

“a word (such as Nevadan or Sooner) used to denote a person who inhabits or is native to a particular place.”

 

The place might be a city, county, state, country, or continent. There also is a Wikipedia page with a set of lists. The word demonym comes from a rather obscure 160-page 1990 book by Paul Dixon titled What Do You Call a Person From...? A Dictionary of Resident Names. Neither my local public library, nor the Boise State University Library has a copy. But the topic also is discussed in a December 2010 Master of Arts thesis by Michael Roberts at the University of New England, titled The Lexical Semantics of Social Categories: Demonyms and Occupation Words in English. Mr. Roberts adds that there are two categories of demonyms - endonyms (or autonyms) which are words used by people of that place to refer to people from a place, and exonyms which are words used by people who are not of that place to refer to people from a place.

 

I blogged about demonyms for cities in a post on September 2, 2013 titled What should we call residents of that city? and on March 26, 2017 in a second post titled Table Topics – What should we call people who live in that city? In southwest Idaho we have demonyms for city residents like Boiseans, Meridianites, Nampans, and Caldwellers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But Boiseans could either refer to residents of Boise city (the state capital in Ada County), or the adjacent Boise county, as shown above.  

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says demonym was first used in 1990, but the Oxford English Dictionary says the current 1990 meaning:

 

“A proper name by which a native or resident of a specific place is known”

 

supersedes two other obsolete meanings:

 

“A general descriptive name used by a writer as a pen name, e. g. ‘An Amateur’, ‘An English Gentleman’, etc.” [first used in 1867]

 

and

 

“A personal name derived from the name of a place from which a person comes.” [first used in 1895]

 

Back on June 26, 1963 President John F. Kennedy famously gave his Ich bin ein Berliner speech, which the Wikipedia page notes led to an urban legend that he’d called himself a jelly doughnut (Berliner). But people in Berlin would call that food a Pfannkuchen. Two other meaty German names for city residents are Frankfurter and Hamburger.

 

Wikipedia has a List of demonyms for US states and territories which shows Hoosiers rather than Indianans, but otherwise mostly shows forming the demonyms using +ns, +ians, +ers, +ites, +ders, and +rs (preceded by appropriate subtractions). Residents of Connecticut are Connecticuters; those carrying knives should be Connecticutters. But Hawaiians is reserved for people of Native Hawaiian descent and the rest just are awkwardly known as Hawaii residents.  

 

Images of a demon logo and Idaho counties map were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

 

UPDATE

The Pearls Before Swine cartoon on February 25, 2023 is about talking to a Hamburger and a Frankfurter. 

This is a bounce house (or an inflatable castle), but not a fun hut

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clear communication requires getting names of things right. When I get tired of serious topics during the morning, I switch my FM radio from NPR to the syndicated comedy Bob & Tom Show from Indianapolis. A few days ago, they were discussing how, when their co-host Tom Griswold, forgot the appropriate phrase, he just substituted another - like fun hut instead of bounce house. (Wikipedia describes it as an Inflatable Castle). There is a March 24, 2014 web page with examples of Tom Speak, like saying jousting stick instead of lance, or lump at the bottom of a blimp instead of gondola.

 

Often there really are different regional names in use, like that a submarine sandwich can be called a hero, grinder, wedge, or poor boy.

 

I also was reminded me of the old TV show Highway Patrol, which opens with the following narration (SNL parody terms added in italics):

 

“Whenever the laws of any state are broken, a duly authorized organization swings into action. It may be called the State Police, State Troopers, Militia, the Rangers, the Pigs, the Heat, the Klingons,… or the Highway Patrol. These are the stories of the men whose training, skill and courage have enforced and preserved our state laws.”

 

The image of a bounce house came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Different perspectives matter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perspective matters. Last week I was pulling into the parking lot of my friendly local public library. When I glanced in my rear-view mirror, I noticed the vehicle opposite me had a logo on the hood saying it was a q33L. Of course, it really was a Jeep – with its name seen backwards, as shown above (via PowerPoint using a Cooper font).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upside down is another perspective, as shown above where 7734 becomes Hell. There is a four-minute YouTube video with the Top 10: Calculator Words (Tricks), visual jokes that can be done on a calculator with a seven-segment display by entering numbers and then turning them upside down to show words:

 

5318008.618 becomes Big Boobies

376006.06 becomes Go Google

55378008.345 becomes She.Boobless

5317.345 becomes She.Lies

7734.55378 becomes Bless.Hell

604.513405 becomes So.HeIsHog

57735.0367 becomes Lego.Sells

710.77345 becomes Shell.Oil

6078.335 becomes See.Blog

707.0113414 becomes HiHello.LOL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And switching word order also can change perspective. I was scanning through a 2017 book (from my friendly local public library) by Megan J. Elias titled Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. On page 127 was a section heading that would better have been Time-Life Series on Foods of the World. But it instead was Time-Life Foods of the World Series, which suggests a single book on the current championship games, as shown above via an imagined book cover.  

 

The hot dog and beer image came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Why does the new logo for our water company look like the backside of an animal?

 

 

 

 

 

In the mail we just received a notice that (following a merger) our water supplier here in Boise was changing its name from SUEZ to Veolia, with the curious red abstract logo shown above. Wikimedia Commons notes the image in that logo doesn’t meet the threshold of originality for a copyright. Wikipedia says Veolia began long ago in France as the Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE). The new name looks to me like a small child’s misspelling and mispronunciation of that for a stringed instrument (a viola).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a water company, I’d have instead expected the logo image shown above - blue rather than red, and flipped with an upright teardrop rather than an inverted one.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On April 6, 2022 I blogged about how It is easy to parody a brand name or logo. The red Veolia logo looks to me like the backside of an animal – perhaps an otter as shown above.  

 

The image of an otter was adapted from this drawing by Pearson Scott Foresman at Wikimedia Commons.

 

It is easy is to parody a brand name or logo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You don’t get to choose your nickname, and might not like what you get called. Every month I get at a letter or postcard advertising Sparklight - the fiber-optic internet provider which before summer 2019 had called themselves CableOne. As shown above, their logo is just a purple slash. But I always refer to them by a parody of that name, Fart light. Why? Twenty years ago (back in 1999) there was an animated comedy film titled South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Inside that film there is another titled Asses of Fire, in which the characters Terrance and Phillip try to light their farts on fire. My logo is a torch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, the satellite TV provider Dish Network has a logo where the letter I is made from a red circle and three successively larger crescents. As shown above, my parody of their logo is Pish (Scotch slang for urine) instead of Dish and shows a stream presumably going down the toilet.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What used to be called Yellow Freight has a logo that already is a parody. Their rounded orange trapezoid clearly is not really Yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One awful choice for a new logo was for a UK agency whose acronym is OGC, the Office of Government Commerce. On September 22, 2021 Joseph Foley discussed it in an an article at the Creative Bloq titled 14 design fails that were so bad they were actually good. As shown above, when you rotate the logo ninety degrees to the right the horizontal line for the G is very rude. It looks like a man with his fly unzipped whose penis is pointing upward.  

 

A zebra crossing and a sleeping policeman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On one of my walks near home I was reflecting about differences in terminology between American and British English. What we call a crosswalk (as shown above) they instead call a zebra crossing. The Oxford English Dictionary definition is:

 

“a pedestrian crossing marked by broad light and dark stripes running parallel to the kerb from one side of a road to the other, at which (in most countries) vehicles must stop if a person wishes to cross.

 

The Wikipedia article titled Pedestrian crossing has a longer description. Other variations appear in Wikipedia. A pegasus crossing is special for horse riders, while a toucan crossing is for both pedestrians and bicyclists. The crossing shown above might also be called a pelican crossing (a pedestrian light-controlled crossing). There also is a puffin crossing (a pedestrian user-friendly intelligent crossing).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What we call a speed bump (as shown above) they instead call a sleeping policeman. The Oxford English Dictionary definition is:

 

“a ramp in the road intended to jolt a moving motor vehicle, thereby encouraging motorists to reduce their speed.”

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The cartoon shown above was adapted from one at the Library of Congress, and an image of a sleeping man was adapted from one at the U. S. National Library of Medicine.