Naming Singapore

Recently someone told me that, oh, Singapore endeavours to be the “S-pop Hub” (S-pop = Singapore pop, just like K-Pop, J-pop). I went, “what? What the fuck is an S-pop hub?!” S-pop is “uniquely Singapore”, duh, so why do we need a hub? You mean S-pop occurs somewhere else in the world?! Like someone in Malaysia who wants to do S-pop has to come to this hub to apply for a license? What’s the thing with the -polis and hub in naming things in Singapore?!?!

Everything in Singapore is either a -polis or a hub. I think one day the Mandai Crematorium might be renamed Mandai Necropolis.  The Ministy of Education might become EduHub (despite there being only one such ministry in Singapore). And then we’d have an InfoHub, Health-Science Polis, EconoHub (Shenton Way, maybe?), Urban Polis Hub (a hub for planning our urban polis, whatever this means). So I think the rule-of-thumb when it comes to building naming in Singapore would be to slot in a -polis or hub somewhere into the name. It does not need to mean anything, it just needs to sound spiffy.