Spoonerisms are my friends; they could be yours too. They work by swapping the initial letters of two or more words around to make something funny; different, anyway. On your phone, for example, “message sent” might be read as “sausage meant”. “Sending message” becomes “mending sausage”.
You won’t see things the same way again! Who says you need toys and equipment to keep kids of any age occupied? Each spoon, or spoonerism, scoops open the mind’s box of questions to answer with stories or one-liners, keeping the childlike, poetic mind alive. When I’m spoon-fed puns, they’re food and drink to me.
I was ready to loathe malls when I came here, but like condos, also despised in the West, they really do offer practical solutions for the tropical climate, monsoons and more. There’s so much in one place, including kids’ play centres and baby facilities. They’re air conditioned and the washrooms are clean. Most seem to feature non-chain, one-off family shops too.
There’s no straight comparison — malls here are as big as villages globally, whereas in the UK malls hardly exist. Europeans would hardly know what a condo is either, unless they’d been to the US or SE Asia.
Seeing a mall called Sunway Putra, inspires me to put all my following spoons and other punishing puns about Malaysian retail spaces into a publication titled Punway Sutra; would you read that? You oredy are wor. Business owners might be scared off; wait till you see what spoonerisms some of these household names yield. No, really.
Sunway Nexis could become known as Nunway Sexist, but only as a joke between you and me. Another big one is Sunway Lagoon, which spoons perfectly into Gunway Saloon without needing to allow for straying vowels (disemvowelment) or consonantal drift; there’s even a cowboy ‘n’ Injun area at Gunway, or Sunway, complete with life-size plastic Native North Americans as they are correctly known, and the colonial settlers.
Will they use my suggestion though? OK, not personalised to this one – any of these revised names below, you try telling them for me please; I don’t want to take the full overwhelming blast of the credit! It may come down to local languages and things like that. You don’t even need to acknowledge me. Thank you, which much of the time in local usage means Thank me.
Moving on to supermarkets, Jaya Grocer and Village Grocer – were they started by brothers, like German stores Aldi and Lidl were? I never know which one I’m in, but that’s because I don’t care. I heard there’s another similar store called Grosser Than You, where unspeakable things such as tomato ketchup cakes and baked bean pao are sold; and that it has an in-store butcher called Butcher Than You. They say there’s another retail offering on the edge of the valley called Grosser by Far.
Another big store, I heard they couldn’t think of a company name for the longest while. Their big storming session still didn’t yield anything, so someone said, Oh put da kettle on – yes, Decathlon (da kettle on; c’mon).
Many household shop names lend themselves to word play. Coming back on to food before a half-time break though, Subway Pyramid at Sunway Pyramid would take equal first place with Gunway Saloon, and is even on the same square kilometre physically. How about that?
So there we are, my legions (of followers – see what I did there?) – I have to go and do some shopping, so I’ll get going and I’ll be back soon with some more kwailo lumps of nonsense fairly spilling out of their spoons. When you try swapping the first letters of “get going”, it spoons perfectly back into “get going”, so there we go.
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