Columbus Day Rant

 

These days it seems that Columbus Day is a holiday that manages to start more arguments than actual celebrations.

Most holidays know what they are. Halloween? Candy. Valentine's Day? Chocolate. Labor Day? Sales. Columbus Day, however, walks into the room like, "Good morning. Today we'll be discussing five centuries of history, exploration, colonization, national identity, and public policy."

And while I’m trying to determine if the banks and post offices are open, everyone else becomes an expert on 1492 … and whether we should be having a parade celebrating Columbus’ voyage or proclamations denouncing it. Social media transforms into the world's least organized graduate seminar, where every comment begins with "Actually..." and ends with someone muting their uncle.

Meanwhile, the retail industry has no idea what to do with the holiday. There's no official Columbus Day candy. No inflatable explorer decorations. No "Christopher's Pumpkin Spice Voyage." Just a handful of mattress sales awkwardly pretending this has always been a shopping event.

The result? Millions of people collectively discovering that history is a lot more complicated than the version that fit on an elementary school worksheet with instructions on how to build a construction paper Santa Maria.

Happy Columbus Day.

Or Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Or Monday.

Whatever you're calling it, I hope you at least remember to check whether the post office is open before leaving the house.

Readers Don't Care

All this hand-wringing about “human writing vs AI writing” feels slightly off. Readers don’t care about the process nearly as much as we think. They care if it holds their attention. If it gives them something.

The real shift is this: competence is now cheap.

So the question for writers isn’t “Should I use AI?” It’s “Am I saying anything that isn’t interchangeable?”

Because if the answer is, “No,” the machine’s already got you covered (and it doesn’t even need coffee).

Memorable Business Names

Near Nørreport Station in Copenhagen I walked past Regret Tattoo Removal. I appreciated the name so much I took a picture and made a mental note to write a blog post about clever business names.

To research I prompted ChatGPT:

List 15 real businesses with clever names and a concise one line explanation of why the name is clever. For example: a restaurant named "Thai Food Near Me" that uses its name to appear at the top a common search that people enter when looking for a restaurant serving Thai food near them.

Here is ChatGPT's response (I didn't bother to rewrite it 'cause it did a decent job of doing the research for me and that was enough for this particular blog post):

Absolutely. Here are 15 real businesses whose names do more than just sound catchy—they communicate what the business does, create a memorable association, or cleverly exploit a phrase people already know.

	Business	What it does	Why the name is clever
	Fur-Get Me Not	Pet care in Northern Virginia/DC	A play on “forget-me-not” that instantly signals pets and creates an affectionate, memorable brand.
	The Great Impasta	Italian restaurant, Brunswick, Maine	Combines “The Great Imposter” with pasta, making the cuisine obvious while giving the name a familiar phrase to latch onto.
	Bread Zeppelin	Salad/bread restaurant	A riff on Led Zeppelin that turns a famous rock reference into a food brand—and makes the product category surprisingly memorable.
	A Salt & Battery	British fish & chips, NYC	Twists “assault and battery” into a perfect description of battered fish, salt, and British chippy food.
	The Codfather	Fish & chips, UK	Replaces Godfather with cod, instantly communicating the restaurant's specialty while borrowing the cultural recognition of a famous movie title.
	Pho Real	Vietnamese restaurant, Pensacola	Sounds like “for real” while using pho to make the cuisine immediately identifiable.
	Hair We Are	Hair salon, Virginia Beach	A simple phonetic transformation of “Here we are” that puts hair directly into the business name.
	The Mane Attraction	Hair salon, Arizona	Turns “main attraction” into mane attraction, making a familiar phrase directly relevant to hair.
	Curl Up & Dye	Hair studio	A darkly funny twist on “curl up and die” that simultaneously describes two core salon activities: curling and dyeing hair.
	Sew What!	Sewing/embroidery shop	Sounds exactly like “So what?”, but the spelling immediately identifies sewing as the business category.
	Barkingham Palace	Dog daycare, boarding & grooming	Buckingham Palace → Barkingham Palace turns a famous place into a playful promise that dogs are treated like royalty.
	Pawsh Dog Wash	Dog & cat grooming, Alexandria, VA	Posh → Pawsh gives the business an upscale feel while replacing the key sound with “paw.”
	Dough-Re-Mi	Sourdough bakery, Meridian, Mississippi	Replaces “Do-Re-Mi” with dough, linking a familiar musical phrase to baking.
	Lickety Split	Ice cream & deli, The Bahamas	“Lickety-split” means very quickly, which is a fun fit for an ice-cream shop selling a quick sweet treat; the name is also inherently playful.
	Maid in Heaven	Residential & commercial cleaning, Virginia	A play on “made in heaven” that simultaneously communicates maid service and implies an almost heavenly level of cleanliness.

The particularly interesting naming patterns

A few of these illustrate different business-name strategies:

• Search/category insertion: Pho Real, Hair We Are, Sew What! — the clever word also contains the thing people are looking for.
• Famous phrase + business keyword: The Great Impasta, The Codfather, Dough-Re-Mi.
• Famous brand/title + industry pun: Bread Zeppelin, Barkingham Palace.
• Phonetic substitution: Pawsh, Mane Attraction, Curl Up & Dye.
• Name that communicates the service without sounding generic: Fur-Get Me Not and Maid in Heaven.

The “Thai Food Near Me” example you gave is actually a particularly interesting category of naming because it goes beyond wordplay into search-intent naming: the business name itself contains a phrase a potential customer might type into Google. That's a different—and potentially very powerful—naming strategy from ordinary puns.

________________________

AI can be a very helpful with research ... but double-check the response (for example, the link for The Codfather is "suspicious" and should've been The Codfather) and, please, before committing fully to using AI, invest a few minutes reading Generative AI: To Be (a tool) or Not To Be (a tool).

We'll circle back.

Businesses across America have a habit of treating chaos as evidence of importance.

• If everyone is overwhelmed, the work must be meaningful.
  
  
• If nobody has enough time, the organization must be moving fast.
  
  
• If priorities change every Tuesday, we must be agile.
  
  
• And if someone finally says, “This isn't sustainable,” we call it a mindset issue.

That mindset issue is often tagged as burnout. And burnout is often discussed as though it were an unfortunate personality trait, not a result of being asked to compensate indefinitely for a system that has no intention of fixing itself.

And, after years working to remain functional while surrounded by decisions that seemed specifically designed to test the limits of human patience, you learn to understand the vocabulary:

• “Resource constraints” means we aren't staffing this properly.
  
  
• “Operational agility” means nobody knows what the hell is happening.
  
  
• “Stretch opportunity” means congratulations, you're doing someone else's job.
  
  
• “High visibility” means everyone will notice when something goes wrong.
  
  
• “Ownership” means you will be held accountable for a decision you were never actually allowed to make.
  
  
• And “we're all in this together” generally means you should probably cancel your weekend.

The Great Escape: Once you break free from this environment (and hopefully, you can), you'll have learned a great deal about leadership, communication, organizational psychology, human endurance, and the impressive number of ways a person can say “We'll circle back” without ever actually circling anywhere.