ACCOUNTANTS are known for their thoroughness, but not always for their creativity.
Perhaps that is why Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand have come up with the long, pretentious and boring name of PricewaterhouseCoopers for the global organisation that will result from their merger on July 1.
It sounds like the name of a Dutch company that makes cheap barrels for use in laundries, and running to 22 letters is almost long enough for the signboard on a Welsh railway station.
Of course, it is fashionable in big business today to run two words together to form a company name while agrammatically leaving a capital letter in the middle.
Thus we have ScottishPower, PowerGen, SmithKline and EuroDisney.
Price Waterhouse and Coopers obviously consider themselves to be in an even bigger league and have felt the need to run three words together.
However, the official explanation of the new name, as you might expect from a bunch of number crunchers, is suitably ponderous.
According to a joint press release, Nicholas Moore, the chairman designate of . . . let's just call it PWC . . . and James Schiro, his chief executive-in-waiting said (speaking in unison):
''In selecting the name for our new organisation we believed that it was critically important . . . to preserve the substantial equity and value associated with the names Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand, to harness the vast reservoir of reputation and trust that both organisations have established.''
Perhaps. But does the dreadful mouthful PriceWaterhouseCoopers really suggest, as the company affirms, ''the combination of an enormously successful past and a breakaway future?''
Not in my book.
Diageo may have come in for a lot of flack as a name. But at least it is a darn sight easier to say than GuinnessGrandMetropolitan.
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