There’s a whole thesis to write on artists who’ve changed the names of their works. For example, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was originally called He Do the Police in Different Voices. That original title—much more social-comic, much less apocalyptic—changes the emphasis of the whole piece and would have made millions of readers and scholars think about the poem (and the modernist worldview) in a different way.

I know this a bit from my own experience. As a student anarchist, I briefly adopted the name Ron Brotherhood—it sounded down to earth and fraternalistic. Ron Brotherhood is not the same thing as Robert Jones, and people reacted differently. The name stuck, and some of my university friends still use it.

In branding, changing name is a big deal. We try in our branding work to help clients make radical changes to themselves, and maybe their industry, and maybe (because Wolff Olins is a child of the 1960s) the world too. So: can a change of name help create that change?

When Grand Metropolitan changed its name, with our help, to Diageo, it was changing reality too: from a hotels business to a beverage company. The name change certainly signalled a radical shift, and—because it sounded less corporate, less grand, less urban, more Mediterranean maybe—hinted at the small, everyday, escapist pleasure of an alcoholic drink. And this helped change reality: investors readily invested.

So our view is that the fact of a name change can get people to stop and think again; the content of the name change can give a clue about what to think; and changing what people think can of course change what they do.

Names are powerful totems. Changing them is indeed, as Ben says, a social act and sends a powerful signal to your social group. In fact, it suggests a pretty serious existential act ("I don’t want to be this, I want to be that")—whether an existential act by an anarchist student, by the author of He Do the Police in Different Voices, or by the people who became Diageo.

It can be a shock to find an aptronym lurking where you least expect it. You might be able to glean that Google’s PageRank algorithm was named after the company’s co-founder Larry Page, but did you know that the warehouse retail chain Price Club (now part of Costco) was named after the businessman Sol Price? Even more improbably, the Outerbridge Crossing, a bridge between Staten Island and New Jersey, got its name from none other than Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.

Sometimes our fascination with aptronyms goes too far, and we confuse correlation with causation. There really was an English plumber in the nineteenth century named Thomas Crapper, though he didn’t invent the flush toilet as commonly believed, and he certainly didn’t give rise to the word crapper as a slang term for "toilet" (crap being a scatological term going back to Middle English).

If Mr. Crapper actually had been responsible for the crapper, then that would be an example of an "eponym," or a name that gets detached from its owner and becomes a common word (sometimes blending with other words). The Crapper story is plausible because we’re forming eponyms all the time: recent high-profile examples include Obamacare, Linsanity, and Tebowing. The names behind successful eponyms can end up lost in the mists of time. Who today remembers Henry Shrapnel or Étienne de Silhouette?

The ease with which we create eponyms suggests a kind of permeability along the border between names and the rest of the language. We want names to do more than simply identify; we want them to describe as well. This also helps to explain the popularity of the Crapper story and similar name-related myths, such as the one about prostitutes first being called hookers after the Civil War general Joseph Hooker, who supposedly allowed his troops to have some wild parties. Our impulse to etymologize leads us to look to names as the source of similar-sounding words, though at times it requires concocting just-so stories to explain the connections.

If names can be so readily converted into non-names, and non-names can be so readily misinterpreted as deriving from names, where does that leave us? As Mark succinctly put it earlier, "We are meaning-seeking animals; we gain intellectual pleasure from figuring things out." Looking for hidden meanings in names is indeed a pleasurable pursuit, even when (or especially when) the meanings we uncover are fanciful.

The history of US slavery provides an egregious example of the symbolic mistreatment of others by naming them. The master-slave relationship allowed whites to label African slaves in a sometimes-mocking fashion (with the name "White," for example)—the ultimate emblematic manifestation of domination of one person over another. Frequently slaves had only given names, and their "surnames" were those of their owner or their occupation (Cotton). This labeling of resulted in profound, more-than-symbolic negative consequences on the recipient, and similar manifestations continue to occur whenever a racial, ethnic, or religious slur is made. In his second post, Mark alludes to the ongoing controversy of objectionable sport team nicknames. While several institutions have abandoned their use of offensive designations, many still employ them because of "tradition" or outright orneriness. This resistance to rational change still appears in the display of the iconic "rebel flag" of the former Confederate States of America, an affront and a threat to African-Americans.

Women too have long faced name-related issues based on the patriarchal nature of our society. Often their given names derive from male names (Carl -> Carla, Paul -> Paula). In the past, the male-centric naming system became more pronounced when women married. For a long time, they were required to change their name to that of their spouse. Birth-name trailblazer and suffragist Lucy Stone (1818–93) fought valiantly to retain her maiden name after marriage. Her resistance to this custom resulted in the creation of the Lucy Stone League in 1921, an organization devoted to the retention of a woman’s birth name after marriage. More recently, marital name traditions have changed, with multiple possibilities becoming available, ranging from birth-name retention, assumption of the spouse’s surname, hyphenation, amalgamation of the two surnames, and more.

Certain performative utterances in specific sanctioned situations may effect the change of a name, e.g., the act of christening, officially sanctioned marital vows performed by a religious figure, a judge’s decree to authorize a name change, legal agreements to establish and protect trademarks and service marks. These institutional actions possess real power. Even a physician’s diagnosis of a disease is deterministic because the patient often loses personal identity and is transformed into the disease label itself ("alcoholic," "schizophrenic").