Punny business

Some things lend themselves to gratuitous use of puns and humorous misspellings. Hairdressers, for example. I’m pretty sure it’s a condition of your hairdressing licence that you come up with some groan-inducing title for your business, such as Curl Up and Dye, The Razors Edge, or Upper Cuts. The same goes for retarded text-speak style spellings. The best one I’ve seen is Devine Hairworx.

But the reigning capital of frivolous business names is Waipukurau. I’m not sure why- possibly some combination of low adult literacy and airborne syphilis I think. On the main street of Waipukurau you can see a crafts store called Scrapbookin’ 2D Max and the Gifts X Setera gift shop. It works on so many levels.

Of course, this sort of moniker malarkey isn’t appropriate in all cases. Newspapers would be pretty thin if editors couldn’t rely on puns or alliteration in their headlines, but they wouldn’t dream of doing so for a serious newsevent. You can get away with it for sports and entertainment, but not when the local orphanage burns down - “building standards debate heats up after orphanage fire”.

So I was a bit surprised to see a doctor’s surgery around town which is called Surgeonz. Call me a stickler for proper English, but there are some professions I would prefer to use correct language. I’d like to be confident that my doctors, judges and airline pilots have sufficient IQ to at least spell properly, and take their business seriously enough to warrant a grammatically correct title. If you’re running a cake shop or teddy bear store, then knock yourself out with the silly business name. But I’d prefer not to fill my prescription at Dr Kool’s Diskount Drugz.

I’m not even sure why they went for the alternative plural z in this case? Is it to show that they are a Kiwi business- well I think we can nut that out based on their premises in Wellington. Are they appealing to Generation Text? Are they offering diagnosis via Facebook?

Patient- Help, I have a shooting pain running down my left arm and I can taste metal.
Doctor- lol maybe uv caught teh ghey from teh interwebz nah jk haha u shud be fine

You can't make this shit up.