Outtake Chapter 9 – The importance of naming names

We first discussed the importance of the ampersand in our institutional name. "It’s classy, and Lily (the marketing manager) likes it, so never use “and” instead of “&.”  He seemed serious, but I blurted, "You mean even while speaking?"  A week or so later, when I asked Lily about the ampersand and how she had chosen it as part of our formal name, she stared back blankly. I realized instantly that Roland had pulled one over on me, making a big deal over a trivial point of punctuation, and later learned he also won a bet he had with Tom Otten, the Director, that I would not catch on for at least a week. I thought the ampersand looked weird when our name was abbreviated, as in PDZ&A, and it sounded pretentious when read out loud. Lily just laughed and told me that our journalistic convention was only to use it when our entire name was spelled out in print, which made sense. It conferred a bit of elegance in that context. While this seemed a bit of an esoteric grammar lesson to me, Lily added a couple of helpful insights that I never deviated from, “In print, we never put the word “the” before PDZA; it just sounds funny. And, never, ever use a small ‘a’ in writing the Aquarium. The Aquarists tend to be very sensitive about that!”