When looking for a possible baby name, my mother opened a book of flowers at random. The page on which she landed? Giant stinking hogweed. So, it is with a certain sense of sisterly affection that I hear the Natural Environment Research Council’s new £200m boat is to be called Boaty McBoatface. Nell “Stinking Hogweed” Frizzell and Boaty McBoatface – we’d have got on just fine.

Except it probably won’t actually get called Boaty McBoatface. Nor will the other imaginative suggestions such as Big Shipinnit or Big Metal Floaty Thingy-Thing likely make the final cut. But, just days after the NERC launched a poll, encouraging the public to suggest a suitable moniker, the Great British public did what it does best – and has been doing for centuries. We took the piss.

From the Bell End to Boaty McBoatface: the trouble with letting the public name things Read more

And I can’t say I’m surprised. This is, after all, the country that created Punch, Viz, Private Eye. The people who call the Queen “Brenda” and the Prince of Wales “Brian”. The nation that dubbed Liverpool Cathedral “Paddy’s Wigwam” and voted to send the Spice Girls on tour to Baghdad. We’ve met with triumph and disaster, and we’ve always made a bum gag just the same. Love it or loathe it, schoolboy humour runs in our blood like Bovril and weak bitter.

Of course, naming the man-made wonders that cross the ocean surface, and the natural wonders that lurk below it, should be a serious business. Just last week I was looking at how the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) names the features on the bottom of the sea. There are some amazing things down there – ocean trenches deeper than Everest, underwater volcanoes pouring out molten lava and towering cliffs of rock – but the names? Frankly, some of them sound more like something from an old cockney music hall act than a world-famous geological discovery: Adieu Canyon, Porcupine Seabight and Lousy Bank spring to mind. Not to mention the faintly carnal Dirck Hartog Ridge or Fafa Piti Seamount.

I was also thrilled to discover that Bill Bailey’s Bank might actually have been named after the Dixieland standard Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey. And, wherever the winds of change might blow me, a part of my heart will always belong to the wonderfully named Lucky Strike Hole. Bury me there, lads. Bury me there.

Bathymetricists aren’t the only ones to fall for the temptation to name something significant after something trivial. Drag your chalky eyes over any climbing forum and you’ll find hundreds of grown men congratulating each other for making the pioneering ascent of Magnolia Thunderpussy or Magical Chrome Plated Semi-Automatic Nuclear Enema Syringe. Bums and mums loom larger than Scafell in these circles, with a typical post reading: “Exploring Uranus, a 5.10c with 1 pa (a pendulum-cool) on the backside of the Chief in Squamish.” Good one, guys. 10/10.

But why is it that, faced with something either impressive, beautiful or pioneering, we so often scuttle back to bums, willies and bad jokes? Partly, of course, it’s because climbers, mariners, mountaineers and geologists, like the rest of us, were all children once. Therefore they remain powerless to resist the overwhelming draw of a fart gag or bulging innuendo.

Man behind RRS Boaty McBoatface disavows his name for polar vessel Read more

But also, particularly in the case of Royal Research Ship Boaty McBoatface, there is an age-old desire to thumb our nose at pomposity. Nothing makes my lips twitch for a knob joke or silly name like a group of middle-aged professionals trying to be inspiring, profound or historic. Like blowing a raspberry in the dramatic pause of a Shakespearean soliloquy, this is how we, the little guys, kick back against the sombre, the sober and the austere.

It may be more accurate to point out that George Osborne’s cuts are going to disenfranchise and debilitate thousands of disabled people. But it’s easier, quicker and more tempting to call him a swivel-eyed buttock with hair like a carpet tile; to pull down your pants and simply shout, “That’s you, that is!” It’s not big, it’s not clever, but it’s what we do.

We are also, after decades of marketing shtick, finally resorting to simple up-yours humour in the face of – albeit well-intentioned – “engagement”. Advertising speak and marketing tactics have crept into every arena of public life, from scientific research to state school education, without our opinions having any apparent impact on policy.

When the railway line wants to you tweet about your journey, or when the supermarket wants you to fill out a satisfaction survey, it’s doubly frustrating when they then hike up prices, reduce contact hours or ignore your complaint. We’re bored of being asked our opinion, then ignored when it doesn’t fit with management ideology. Of course, I doubt that any of the thousands of people who crashed the Natural Environment Research Council website had a genuine gripe with NERC. We’re just getting a little sick of toothless public “engagement”. And we can’t help but make jokes.

As anyone who’s ever asked their friends for help in naming a band, company or project well knows, someone is always going to take the piss. Asking for help is an open goal for British irreverence. Maybe we’re infantile, maybe we’re silly and maybe we’re making a mockery of important environmental research, but I’d rather call a boat Boaty McBoatface than name it after some morally questionable colonial-era “adventurer”. And I’d much rather make a joke than risk looking earnest.