History of humans may boil all the way down to the history of
naming things. Sometimes the naming is good, sometimes not. Moby-Dick sounds a
whole lot better than The Whale; Ulysses and The Odyssey are not really
inspired titles for fantastic books, nor is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or The
Recongitions for that matter. The Bible doesn’t say much about the book, and
Love in the Time of the Cholera does; why You Should Refrigerate Food does tell
you what’s inside a basically empty book, and Catch-22 does not.
The Standard Model (with quantum chromodynamics folded into
it) is a very bad name for something
that describes the world of elementary particle physics; Democritus’ “atom” has stood the test of 24
centuries and is pretty, while muon (god help it) will survive by sheer fits of
agony. QED and ACD are good initials for
big things, but big things like giant laboratories tend to have pretty bad acronymic
names (SLC, CERN, DESY).
I just wrote a post about the creation of the binomial
naming grid of Linnaeus, which was one of the greatest naming inventions of all
time—it performs an organizing principle that created other organizing
principles.
Sometimes the names of things outlive their usefulness, and
come full circle, sometimes providing an unintended and ironic reminder of untimely
pasts. In
India there’s Lodhi Road,
Mughal Gardens
and Aurangabamnd; we have our own in this country in places like the Jefferson-Lee
highway and Fort Myer’s
(Virginia)
Mosby Gate.
The massiveness of this idea is just overwhelming—all I
really want to do here is get to the naming of a Ford Motor car. And the namer, in this case, was the poet
Marianne Moore. (I’ve always liked her,
and her poetry, and her love for Mickey Mantle and baseball and Muhammad Ali
and so on) Ford found itself a little behind
the times back there in the autumn of 1955, trying to figure out a new,
with-it, tiger-whipping name for its new $250 million dollar car from their
Special Products Division They had
something like “Firebird” in mind—unfortunately for them the name was already
taken. David Wallace, the head of Ford,
wanted something elegant and fleet, and to that end contracted with the great
poet Ms. Moore to come up with one.
Ms. Moore had a dry sense of humor and did submit a number
of entries, though none were successful, and probably none were intended to
be. After looking at sketches and drawings of the
new car, she came up with “The Ford Silver Sword” almost right away (named
after a flower she said that grew only on Mt. Haleakala
above 10,000 feet or some such thing). She then submitted a
number of others including the “Patelogram”,
the “Mongoose Civique”, and the “Utopian Turtle Top”, and then many many more.
Mr. Wallace came to realize that Ms.Moore was having a bit of fun with his
company, and sought to terminate their relationship, with some aplomb.
He wrote:
Dear Miss Moore,
Because you were so kind to us in our early days of looking
for a suitable name, I feel a deep obligation to report on events that have
ensued.
And I feel I must do so before the public announcements of
same come Monday, November 19.
We have chosen a name out of more than six thousand-odd
candidates that we gathered, It fails
somewhat for the resonance, gaiety, and zest we were seeking. But it has a personal dignity and meaning to
many of us here.
Our name, dear Miss Moore—is Edsel.
I’m sure that Ms. Moore must’ve had a good, solid laugh on
that one.
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