What's Right.

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.

In time, the nonsense did stop, although I can't help noticing that one of the favorite advertising firms of the Internet boom still markets itself under the cuter-than-cute name "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." In slower economic times, the business world reverts to basics -- maybe not quite so basic as Amalgamated Iron & Steel, but basic enough.

Last month, Vice President Cheney presented the 2002 Baldrige awards, the country's highest recognition of business quality. One of the three winners had a nonsense name so old that it practically counts as English: Motorola. (Motorola began life as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. It introduced the first car radios in the 1930s, and combined the words "motor" and "Victrola" to create a brand name. The company then took the name as its own in 1947.)

The second winner goes by an acronym: SSM Health Care. SSM happens to be short for Sisters of St. Mary, the Franciscan order that originally sponsored the hospitals that have grown into the SSMHC chain. The acronym is a thin disguise for an organization that forthrightly dedicates itself to "reveal[ing] the healing presence of God."

The third had the most stolid name of them all: Branch-Smith Printing. Believe it or not, Branch-Smith Printing is a printing company. It was founded by a Mr. Smith in 1910. His daughter and her husband, a Mr. Branch, took over the company in 1954, and Branch-Smith Printing has been the name ever since.

Dan Henninger, the Wall Street Journal's wry cultural-affairs commentator, warns that this turn toward sobriety in the naming of businesses may be an indication of the leaching of all the fun out of the work of business. "[B]ack in the early days of what came to be known as Silicon Alley, teams of very bright 20- and 30-somethings assembled new businesses in downtown Manhattan, more or less hooked to the Internet, and worked insane hours to make it go. And they worked those hours before the valuation poison hit. . . . So what if much of it failed? What those infant entrepreneurs brought to the economic culture was nonstop chatter about creation, problem-solving, stamina and winning. The thrill, for now, is gone."

If Henninger is right, then the revival of corporate names that Andy Rooney and Russell Baker can understand is an expression not of plain English but of a glum marketplace. And yet, the new literalism may after all yield its benefits. Years ago, I rented an apartment in New York City from a psychiatrist who kept his office on a lower floor. He had a very swank clientele: Limousines would idle in front of his stoop hour after hour as their owners spilled their anxieties inside.

I once asked my psychiatrist-landlord whether his rich clients came to him with similar problems, and he said that they all came to him with the same problem: They all felt like frauds. The world looked at them and saw corporate titans and geniuses of finance, but when they looked inside themselves, they had no idea who they were. Very sad, but maybe just a little bit of the problem was of their own making. I mean, if I were CEO of Accenture, I'd have no idea who I was either. But I bet the late owner of American Plier and Wrench never suffered from the "Who am I?" problem. He was an American who made pliers and wrenches -- and isn't that answer enough for anybody?