What did the title in Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" refer to?

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Burgess wrote that the title was a reference to an old Cockney expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange". Due to his time serving in the British Colonial Office in Malaysia, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used punningly to refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) human. Burgess wrote in introduction to the 1986 edition, titled 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 color and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil; or the almighty state." In his essay "Clockwork Oranges", 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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange#Explanation_of_the_novel.27s_title Aug 04 08, 6:16 PM