Nothing left to the name game in a world of constant change

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It started with Great Woods. I mean the Tweeter Center. I dialed information to get the number, heard "Welcome to Verizon" and thought, not just that Verizon sounds like an antibiotic (Erythromycin? Tetracycline? Verizon?), but what's with all these companies changing their names?

Bank of Boston is Fleet Bank. The new Boston Garden is the FleetCenter. Fleet means to move swiftly and vanish. A great name for sneakers (oops - for running shoes) but why would a bank call itself this?

"Distinguishing yourself from competitors is the fundamental goal of the naming business," says Steve Manning, who owns a brand-consulting firm in Sausalito, Calif.

But it is not the only goal.

More than 50 countries have changed their names in the last 40 years. The Congo is Zaire, Rhodesia is Zimbabwe, Ceylon is Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia is Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the U.S.S.R. is way too many to list. Can't find your way around the world? This may be why.

In our own back yard, we've changed the names of roads. (Dover Street is East Berkeley Street and where is U.S. 1 these days? Is it still Providence Highway? Or is it Interstate 93?)

And bridges. The Mystic River Bridge is now the Tobin and the old Bunker Hill Bridge is now the new Leonard Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge.

And public transportation. The Elevated became the MTA which became the MBTA which everybody calls the T.

And the T stops. Washington Street Station is Downtown Crossing; Columbia is UMass-JFK.

We've also changed the names of places. Boston City Hospital is now Boston Medical Center. The West End is Charles River Park. Adams Corner is Adams Village. And Columbia Point is Harbor Point.

Even the police have a different name: The MDC Police became part of the Massachusetts State Police.

And on it goes, merging, changing, consolidating.

Armistice Day is Veterans Day; Decoration Day is Memorial Day; Washington's Birthday is Presidents Day. Secretaries are administrative assistants, stewards and stewardesses are flight attendants, and custodians are maintenance engineers. ValuJet is AirTran. BPM is Shaws. Schaeffer Stadium became Sullivan Stadium, then Foxboro Stadium. And now it's going to be CMGI Stadium? Who can keep up with this?

Reinvention is all around. Mel Brooks used to be Melvin Kaminsky. Elton John was Reginald Dwight. Meg Ryan was Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra. Then there is Prince who became "the artist formerly known as Prince" and now he's Prince again. And Puff Daddy, who was Sean "Puffy" Combs and is now P. Diddy. Even the Lockheed brothers, famous not for entertaining anyone but for building airplanes, changed their name from Loughead to Lockheed. (Can you blame them?)

As if all this weren't confusing enough, there are people out there changing the names of birds. The falcated teal is now the falcated duck. The beardless flycatcher is the now the Northern beardless tyrannulet and the gray-headed junco has recently become the dark-eyed junco (hair coloring perhaps?).

Washington Airport is now Reagan Airport. Hulman is Terre Haute.

Manic depressives are bipolar; welfare is transitional assistance and everything, including bad behavior, is a syndrome.

Does nothing stay the same? "Gone With the Wind" was originally "Tomorrow's Another Day," "Treasure Island" was "The Sea Cook" and "Catch-22" was "Catch-18." Would these books have sold as well with these discarded names?

And what about movies? Would "Birds of a Feather" have been as big a hit as "Bird Cage"? Or "I Was a Teenage Teenager" as "Clueless"?

Or "Coma Guy" instead of "While You Were Sleeping"? Or "$ 3,000?" instead of "Pretty Woman"?

The name Bell was around in the telephone business for more than 100 years. Will any of today's names survive that long?

Even this newspaper has had its share of name changes - the Boston Herald, the Boston Herald American and now just the Boston Herald again. But Herald has always been part of the name.

Herald means messenger, which is a whole lot better than meaning "to vanish." It also means to proclaim. It doesn't sound like an antibiotic or the tweet-tweet a bird makes. In the name department, it's a keeper.