Here's an idea: how about if all the cars and trucks and sports teams we name for fleet and powerful animals and cosmic energies and cool-sounding things that don't actually exist or mean anything (Integra! Camry!) are, effective immediately, renamed for literary characters and authors.
Wouldn't that be great? So instead of the Escalade we have the Evangeline, instead of the El Dorado we have the Elmer Gantry, instead of the Hummer we have the massive gleaming Huckleberry Finn.
And it's even more fun with sports teams — the Kimberley Kims! The Port Macquarie Patrick Whites! The Townsville Twains! Imagine the logo possibilities — the Twains with a bushy-haired Samuel Langhorn Clemens peering cheerfully over the bill of their ball caps, the University of Melbourne's Fighting David Maloufs with that wise bespectacled soul on their broad chests ... the mind doth reel.
And this allows us, at least on my home turf in the still-grappling-with-racism-although-slightly-less-so-today-what-with-our-black-president America, to sidestep the problem of sports teams being named for people with skin slightly darker than most of the people playing and following that team: Redskins, Braves, Chiefs, Indians. It's a dopey custom, and we are easily rid of it when we find ourselves rooting instead for the Cleveland Icaruses and the Kansas City Chinos (with the overture from West Side Story blaring from every speaker in the stadium).
For once city council and corporate board meetings would be riveting, as Los Angeles teams vie to see who can snag the names Marlowe and Chandler, and who will be the Los Angeles Easy Rawlins, with a box seat reserved for the great novelist Walter Mosley. The New Orleans Moviegoers, the Harvard University Fighting Henry Adamses ...
And the loss of so many weird and puzzling car names would be a great gift to the known world. Achieva, Cabrio, Elantra, Galant, Impreza, Passat, Reatta, Vandura, all gone and unmourned, and in their places we find the Deerslayer, the Scarlet Letter, the Augie March, the Joe Wilson, the Banjo Clark (for all that he was a real and wonderful man, was there ever more of an Australian legend than the national Uncle?).
Although there are some current cars that could and should keep their names: the Somerset and the Swift, for two, not to mention Stanzas and Dashers and Darts.
I can hear you arguing now: isn't it an act of wild creation itself, to invent ridiculous names for cars,