The Pier 39 area had so much ingenious language play, my notebook and camera were always in use. The store names, especially, took my fancy. Quite plainly the only reason there were rules in the English language was to bend and break them, to maximum effect. Several played with spelling and puns. Krazy Kaps sold novelty headwear. Bare Escentuals sold cosmetics. Shirtique sold casual men’s wear. Le Beastro was a dog boutique. The cat boutique relied on a different strategy adopt a familiar expression: Here Kitty Kitty. Similarly conversational was an art shop run by a Michael Godard: Oh My Godard. And several stores relied on everyday allusions. To Herb With Love sold aromatherapy bath salts. Charms by the Bay sold charms. The San Francisco Sock Market sold, well, socks. Not even grammar could escape. Collectible knives were sold at We Be Knives. I had to leave, as I’d arranged to meet some colleagues after lunch, at the cafe on the corner of the psychological heart of downtown San Francisco, Union Square. It was early November, and when I reached the square they were in the process of erecting a giant eight-foot Christmas tree. A man in a box at the end of a crane was trimming the tree into a perfect triangular shape. The ground was littered with discarded branches. It was a pleasantly warm day — this was northern California, remember — and the square was packed with tourists and shoppers. A group of diminutive children walked past all wearing sweaters that said Giants. ‘Why giants?’ I asked someone at the next table. I got a withering ‘limey’-like look. San Francisco Giants is the local baseball team. Actually, Americans shouldn’t be too quick to condemn Brits, seeing as the name of the game is a British import in the first place. The earliest recorded usage is from England in 1744, when a children’s alphabet-book includes ‘B is for base-ball’, and describes a game in which a ball is hit with the hand and the hitter runs to the next post. Probably the most famous early reference is from a totally unexpected source. We would not associate baseball with Jane Austen, but there it is, in the opening chapter of Northanger Abbey, where the charmingly imperfect heroine, Catherine Morland, is described as preferring ‘cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books’. That was written in about 1799. Another British import was being read at the next table — a Harry Potter book. At least, an Americanized edition of Harry Potter. I could tell by the title: it read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone — not Philosopher’s Stone. Evidently, the American publisher felt that US children would have some difficulty with the notion of a philosopher.
