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Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression, "As queer [meaning strange] as a clockwork orange", but that he had found that other people read new meanings into it1. For instance, some believed that the title referred to a mechanically-responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay for person). Burgess states in his later introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked", that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange -- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil." Rumour had it that Burgess had intended to name the work "A Clockwork Orang" and was thus hypercorrected to the form we know. In his essay "Clockwork oranges"2 he says that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness". This title alludes to the protagonist's conditional negativistic responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.
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