What's in a name?

I must admit I was a little sad when I first heard that Tulse Hill was to gain a Thai restaurant. This isn't Hoxton or Notting Hill, for crying out loud. We don't do culinary trends here. We do the classics: pizza, Chinese, Indian, and fried chicken. A hell of a lot of fried chicken, in fact. We do not do Thai fusion.

My worries vanished as soon as I learnt the name of this new establishment:

A rose by any other name... would in this instance be much better

You can sort of see how it happened: "Right, we're setting up a Thai restaurant. Let's have a pun in the name! Ideas, anyone?" You can imagine the moment that some bright spark said: "Wait! I've got it! Thaicoons!" You can envisage the people round the table making appreciative noises: "Yes! Thaicoons! Brilliant!"

What I can't understand is why, after the intial enthusiasm, no one gave it any deeper thought. Why did no one suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and realise that they were setting up a restaurant with a vaguely racist name? And, better than that, they were setting it up in notoriously cosmopolitan South London?

We may never know the answers to those questions. But what I do know is that Tulse Hill's only Thai restaurant hasn't changed the character of this little area of South London. It has simply strengthened its wacky charm.