Confederacy of a Dunce

Thursday, November 08, 2007

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On the way from our house to the bus stop, I walk through a handy pedestrial underpass to avoid crossing the very busy, high-speed deathtrap of a road that is Westbury Avenue (two "newsworthy" accidents in the last month alone: exhibit A, exhibit B). It's nice and well-lit, but on the other side is a large, plain wall which often attracts scrawled graffiti. It was recently painted over, but more graffiti has sprung up. It seems like it might be a roll of gang names, all written in black marker in the same handwriting. If so, I think some of the gang members might have gotten a bum deal when names were handed out. The list is below, in the order in which they appear. Is your gang name on there?

Lucifer
Satan 666
TMD
Flying Sqod
NPK
Love of Money
SW1 Crew
Assasins
Rowdey
Shower
Mob
Mob H Town
Buger Bar
Clap Town South
28

My favorite among these is Love of Money, which is a great gang name for reasons that are made clear in T.E.Cliffe Leslie's 1862 essay of the same title.

And I can hardly pick on those names that evoke evil or violence, as these sorts of names are crucial for instilling a sense of dread and fear. Included among these are Lucifer, Satan 666, Assasins, Mob, Mob H Town ("H" possibly referring to Haringey [local area] or Hackney [nearby and with perhaps more street cred than H'gey]), and to a lesser extent Rowdey, and possibly Flying Sqod. The latter is especially notable, as at the time of writing it yields exactly zero Google hits (Did you mean: "flying squad". No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.). No doubt this is a clever ploy to separate oneself from the zillions of Flying Squads out there (Results 1 - 10 of about 203,000 for "flying squad").

It's also fine to self-identify with a particular location as this follows a long tradition of geographically based gang names. Here we have Clap Town South perhaps referring to Clapton in east London, or Clapham in south London (see the similarly named Clap Town Kids from Clapham who have received some attention in the press), Mob H Town as mentioned before, and the SW1 Crew (SW1 referring to a London postcode with serious credibility on the streets, being home to Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and 10 Downing Street).

Then we have the cryptic ones, which are also just fine as they protect the identity from the authorities. For example, TMD. Could this be noted author Thomas M. Disch? Or maybe this person suffers from temporomandibular joint disorder (also known as TMJ) and has adopted its name as a statment of strength through adversity. NPK is much easier to figure out; this name is clearly a reference to fertilizer (N: Nitrogen, P: Phosphorous, K: Potassium). 28 is cryptic as well. It could either refer to the atomic number of nickel (hence a very clever reference to wealth, a subtle take on "Love of Money" mentioned above), or perhaps a shout-out to street hero Zbiegniew Brzezinski who was born on March 28, 1928.

And finally, there are the real losers. I think these are the gang members who were not present when the names were being handed out, and were assigned names for their insult value. I'm talking about Buger Bar (presumably this name is a degenerate form of Burger Bar, aka fast food joint, and I suspect its owner is above average in girth and displacement), and even worse, Shower, presumably a filthy young gentleman whose name must be a form of comedic opposition. Perhaps I, the Dunce, should count myself among their number.

From the names, I think these are all young gentlemen; ladies' names on such lists tend to contain one or more of the following: {Miss, Ms, Lady, Queen, Baby}, as in MS FLYING SQOD. Anyway, I look forward to meeting these young gentlemen and discussing their branding strategy in great detail.

language

Thursday, November 08, 2007 11:49:49 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)