Name games a real treats

   Trick and treat, y’all. No, not trick OR treat. Trick AND treat.

   When people play with puns, or in other words, do tricks with the English language, to me it’s quite a treat. Like brain candy.

   When I worked in Winder, a storage facility named “Amazing Space” always made me smile as I drove by. Humble Grounds, a restaurant that started out as a coffee house and Savy Junktion, a boutique where I bought many stocking stuffers, have closed up shop, sad to say. But their names were on this list that’s been years in the making and I hated to see such wit go to waste.

   Along Hwy 81 south of Winder, two bait shops play into this whorl of words: Happy Hooker, run by Carol Soukup-Grealish, and Quik Bite, owned by retiree Herbert Hunter, who says he opened his business just for something to do. Even if he doesn’t sell any worms, he’s still doing something just by entertaining the weary traveler.

   At the Winder Chautauqua Festival I picked up business cards from Pipe Dreams, which is all about wind chimes, Wing Ding, bird houses with personality and CentrePointe Community Church which peppered the place with slogans like “What’s the Point?” and “Get to the Point!” 

   I always loved “Pick-A-Part,” a car parts salvage place on Buford Highway and “Autow,” a wrecker service owned by Andy Harrell in Snellville. 

   Lewis Robinson made his mission clear by calling his window cleaning service “Heavenly Vision,” and so did a quilting group at All Saints Lutheran Church who call themselves “Piecemakers” 

   Some business names parody literary titles like “A Man and His Mower” and “Two Guys and a Truck,” or colloquial expressions like “‘I Do’ Weddings.”

   I love it when people play with their own names. Lawrenceville weight trainer, George Herring offers “Body by George,” Lilburn’s Jimi Taylor creates “Taylor Made Gifts,” Lilburn harpist, Debra Peterson entertains the ear and the encephalon with “Petersongs,” and the owner of Carnett, a car wash business that originated in Gwinnett morphed “car” with his own last name, “Arnett.”

   Thrift stops seem to have a corner on clever names: Back by Popular Demand and Second Time Around in Lilburn and I-Deal Pawn and Jewelry in Lawrenceville are just a few.

   Some businesses add a visual element like Sawhorse, a renovating company in Doraville, whose logo is a horse with a circular saw for a mane.

   And even individuals play the brain game. A book club in Duluth calls themselves the Read Hatters and a mailbox on a 20-foot high post in Suwanee bears a sign that reads “Airmail.”

   I’m sure y’all have your own bag of tricks and treats. If you e-mail them to me, maybe I can pile up enough to make another column full of brain candy.


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