Why "A Clockwork Orange"

[herr_oberst]

Has anybody ever heard a compelling or reasonable definition of this title?

Seems like even the author isn't quite sure. Maybe just syllables that sounded good to him, then when the book was a success felt obliged to define the title... JMHO, of course, and I'd be interested to hear what others think, or may have read or heard?

From Wikipedia:

quote "* That he had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange" in a London pub in 1945 and assumed it was a Cockney expression.¹ In Clockwork Marmalade, an essay published in the Listener in 1972, he said that he had heard the phrase several times since that occasion. However, no other record of the expression being used before 1962 has ever appeared.[3] Kingsley Amis notes in his Memoirs (1991) that no trace of it appears in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Historical Slang.
* His second explanation was that it was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning "man." The novel contains no other Malay words or links.[3]
* In a prefatory note to A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music, he wrote that the title was a metaphor for "...an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into a mechanism."[3]

In his essay, "Clockwork Oranges," ² Burgess asserts 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 positively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will. To reverse this conditioning, the protagonist is subjected to a technique in which violent scenes displayed on screen, which he is forced to watch, are systematically paired with negative stimulation in the form of nausea and "feelings of terror" caused by an emetic medicine administered just before the presentation of the films." Close quotes.