‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me,’ we used to chant in childhood to ward off epithets hurtful to the prepubescent psyche. But why should mature captains of industry be at once so sensitive about their existing names, and so insensitive about the new ones they are adopting in the course of the current nomenclatural revolution? With the Royal Mail, the British Post Office has one of the most prestigious brands in the world. It has the upscale tone and royal connections that less venerable operations die for. Yet its management has decided to ditch its regal name and resurrect it as Consignia, which sounds like some form of latex protective, calculated more to guarantee non-delivery than to ensure rapid dispatch.
Admittedly there are precedents on the Royal Front. When the British royal family, formerly known as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, reinvented itself as the House of Windsor, it was the result of a bitter four-year war with Germany and a calculated effort to disguise the almost entirely German origins of the royal dynasty.
But what sort of Armageddon excuses Andersen Consulting becoming Accenture? Surely any reasonable consultant could have told them that this was a waste of syllables that actually destroys the value of an invaluable corporate brand. At one time, CEOs could hold their heads high and tell their colleagues at the Chamber of Commerce that they had retained Andersen Consulting. Now, their colleagues will probably respond, ‘Bless you!’ and hand a tissue to any colleague who says, ‘Accenture!’
It all began decades ago. Someone at oil giant Esso wanted to break away from the old Standard Oil connection. This was a trifle obsessive, since not one in a hundred of the customers at the gas pump knew that Esso stood for S.O. Standard Oil, and probably only a further hundredth cared in the slightest about any residual Rockefeller connections.
But by becoming Exxon it became meaningless, etymologically unrelated to any known word in any known language and connotation-free. That is, until the Exxon Valdez developed heavy connotations of environmental disaster when it ran ashore off Alaska. In the rest of the world, Esso was too good a brand name to lose, so from Argentina to the UK, the company’s gas stations retained their Esso signs, thus averting the chilly Arctic shipwreck karma when it came. And now, it is ExxonMobil – until the next merger produces an even less euphonious moniker.
Clearly names are important, even meaningless ones. ‘What song the Syrens sung, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture,’ wrote eccentric English doctor and essayist Sir Thomas Browne some four centuries ago. The chances are that Achilles himself would now bear a new name, whether he was with the women or on the battlefield. I’d suggest AXzlez to be in touch with modern times. However, if Browne wanted to conjecture, he could just scrutinize the computer-generated lists of domain names and trademarked brand names which surely by now must include almost any pronounceable combination of syllables in any major language.
We must presume that, apart from the rampant cupidity of public relations consultants, the copyrighted lists are the engines for current corporate nominal inventiveness. There can be few other excuses.
Once upon a time, I got my mobile phone from OmniPoint. Within weeks, when I called to find why my home in midtown Manhattan was off the network for weeks on end, I found the response was, ‘Hello, OmniPoint is now VoiceStream.’ I was still without a stream of voices on my phone, whichever name was attached to the bill!
My home phone and DSL service were from Bell Atlantic. No longer: they now come from Verizon, although I still have to log on to BellAtlantic.net to find out why my e-mail is taking two or three days to osmose oleaginously through the server. The company claims that the name evokes ‘veritas,’ the Latin for truth, and ‘horizon.’ And it’s true that since the name change much of my e-mail has stayed the other side of the horizon. This explanation for the name smacks of retrospective corporate folk etymology, invented to justify an otherwise silly and meaningless invention. In fact, doesn’t it sound much more like a variant on Viagra?
It may go against the tide of deregulation, but I feel the time has come for some international agency to step in. No intellectual property rights should reside in any name until its sponsors prove to a panel of poets and lexicographers that there is some intellect behind it. And to rub it in, we could call the panel NominymX, or something equally silly, as a perverse reminder of what it’s for.
The Speculator
