What's Right.(company names)

What's in a (Company) Name

A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a man whose grandfather had owned a company called (let me scramble the name slightly to protect privacy) "American Plier and Wrench." The company made (again scrambling slightly) -- guess what? -- pliers and wrenches.

How old-fashioned such a name now seems. Since the stock-market boom of the 1960s, we have gotten used to the idea that a company's name should tell us nothing at all about the business it does. Andy Rooney -- or was it Russell Baker? -- used to make amusing geezerish sport of names like Exxon and Citicorp. It's gotten to the point where a name that clearly conveys what a company does seems somehow unambitious or stuck in its ways. Even the tradition-minded jettison the full name in favor of initials: UPS or IBM or BP.

During the Internet bubble of the 1990s, though, corporate naming jumped forward into a brave new postmodern world of irony and self- mockery. Hence Yahoo! and Google, OneMain.com and CreativeCow.net. Or maybe you remember Red Herring magazine? Liquid Audio? The half-dozen companies with Hedgehog in their name -- all now dead and buried?

At one point I joined the gold rush myself and spent a miserable weekend trying to register a domain name. As I struck out again and again, I tried increasingly absurd names -- and found that they were taken, taken, taken. I was finally reduced to the childish act of trying BarfingDog.com. That I could have.

Whatever else you say about it, the Internet is certainly a fine way to burn hours. After the BarfingDog fiasco, I became curious about naming trends, and started typing one name after another into the online registry. AmalgamatedIronandSteel.com? Available. ContinentalRubberandTire.com? Available. AcePetExterminators.com? Available. UnitedSteamshipLines.com? Also available.

For a brief mad moment, it occurred to me that UnitedSteamshipLines.com might make a very clever title for an online travel magazine . . . and then I caught myself. I realized that I was being ironic about the irony of the Internet age. I was being ironically ironic. I was being post-postmodern. This nonsense had to stop before I fell off the edge of the world.