The Law Is an Ass   

Welcome to blog two on our ambitious journey to transform the service we receive inside our favourite pubs and bars. As we said in our first blog, the odds were against us as a privately financed and socially inspired start-up, and we were not sure we would be around to write blog two!

Fortunately, we have managed to get a few venues to sign-up and have had some nice feedback along the way. We have also had some constructive feedback about how to improve our service for venues and users, which we are busy addressing right now.     

However, those early successes are not the reason for blog two. The content of blog two is also not quite what we had anticipated it would be at this stage of our journey.     

Since our launch, we had hoped to be answering questions on social media about how our service could help venues and customers, even dealing with the odd objection or complaint. However, we have spent most of the time explaining our name to a certain group of individuals that take both pride in the English language but also great offence in what they perceive to be any slight impurity in how said language is used.       

Yep, the Grammar Police!     

It’s been an eye-opener and also quite disturbing at times to witness how some seemingly normal people wish to interact with us, apparently in the hope of making us feel or look stupid. So, in the hope of reducing some of the controversy, we thought we would dedicate blog two to explaining our name, which we had assumed would be rather obvious. 

Two Oranges Walk Into a Bar   

We said in our debut blog our name is inspired by an old joke. We won’t ruin the surprise, but for those that frequent more sophisticated pubs and bars than us, we encourage you to google “two oranges walk into a bar”.    

There are several variants to the joke, it has been used on me quite successfully many times in order to draw attention to my expanding beer belly.      

As a service inspired within and designed for pubs and bars, with the purpose of buying a round of drinks, we thought this bar joke, making indirect references to a round of drinks, would be a good starting point for a name. After all, going to the pub is about having fun and sharing jokes!    

So, the first question is why is our name not Your Round like the joke? Notwithstanding the fact that this would also leave us open to similar attacks in regard Your or You’re, the simple answer is the domain was already taken, though we may not have used it anyway, as we explain below.   

Why not two oranges? We needed to design a logo to reference our name and the joke. After many designs, we decided to have just the one round orange along with a clearly un-round lemon, also a common fruit at the pub, as this would offer a clear non-verbal reference to the joke and also support more marketing initiatives at a later stage (if we make it that far). The final logo, that you see at the top of this page, worked best with “Who’s Round” in our view and therefore this is how our name was born.  

Obviously, we could have still called ourselves Whose Round and this would I am sure alleviate some of the current discontent in the grammar police community. However, we chose not to because we preferred the not so subtle references to the joke, it is a pun after all!

The Cover-Up   

A couple of serious and committed officers have suggested that we embarked on a major cover-up operation to hide our original grammatical error.     

All we can offer in our defence on this is that our domain, www.whos-round.com, at the last renewal cost the grand total of $13.16, or about £10.12 for the year and will be similar in subsequent years. 

 We are not awash with cash, though the suggestion that we would embark on such an exotic and expensive cover-up to save 84p per month is amusing. Be assured if we had made a mistake, we would happily incur the loss, hit ctrl + R on our content pages and have a new name on our site by the end of the day. It is not expensive or technically challenging. 

It’s Just Not Funny   

We could be guilty of a bad sense of humour and not very funny, and our name might not please all but alas it is grammatically correct to achieve the pun that we intended. It might not even be a very good idea, but we are not seasoned professionals, we are a few friends who gave it a go, so no regrets, even if we fail miserably!    

We are hopeful that this blog explains our thinking. Please be nice in your comments, or just leave us alone, as like you we are people and not perfect. We have made no claims about our literacy skills, we are just trying to help people get a round of drinks and have developed a pretty good service for doing so.