The Pretentious Idiot’s Guide to Pronouncing Meaningless Gibberish

The historical record of corporate disasters is replete with epic naming errors. When United Airlines changed its name to Allegis in 1987, it triggered widespread ridicule, so much so that four months later they fired the CEO and cancelled the name change.¹ Names have power.

One shareholder memorably said that “Allegis” sounded like “the next world-class disease” and that:

The name change made me more militant as an investor and more willing to speak out against management, because I thought it was so wrong. And I think it had an important psychological role. It brought out even more anger at management and made a lot of people say they had finally had it.²

By the way, can you guess the name of this shareholder? Check the footnote to find out.

In 2021, the Scottish asset manager Standard Life Aberdeen changed its name to abrdn, a decision which was widely ridiculed and which continues to haunt the company. Earlier this month, the CIO of abrdn complained that this ongoing derision amounted to “corporate bullying.”³

My own firm, Acadian Asset Management, has a name that is unapologetically vowel-heavy and that proudly embraces capital letters. As an expert in quantitative methods and natural language processing, I’ll point out that 100% of the greatest investors in history (Warren Buffett, for example) have both vowels and capital letters in their names. It makes sense: alpha itself is a vowel. And in volatile markets, you must never be under-capitalized.

Now, I’m an easy-going guy, and if the good people of abrdn are happy with their life choices, I say live and let live. And abrdn is after all based in Britain, which—while a wonderful country that is home to my excellent British colleagues—is a linguistic dystopia where “Lieutenant Featherstonehaugh” is pronounced "Left Tenant Fanshaw." Speaking for myself, I’m thankful that my own country threw off the yoke of British oppression in 1776.

However, I draw the line at the linguistic practices of D/XYZ, the parent of The Destiny Tech100 Fund. The Destiny Tech100 is a closed-end fund that listed on NYSE on March 26^th and has the dubious distinction of having (to the best of my knowledge) the highest premium of any closed-end fund in human history: on April 8^th it had a price of $105 but a NAV of $4.84, giving it a premium of 2,069%.

I hope to say more about the pricing of this fund in a future post, but for now let me just say a premium over 2,000% is obviously outrageous. For more on this fund, see the discussion from the indispensable Matt Levine of Bloomberg.⁴

A premium of more than 2,000% is a ludicrous insult to the Law of One Price (a cherished principle of rational finance). But an insult of even greater ludicrosity comes from D/XYZ, which seems determined to attack the English language or perhaps the very concept of written language itself.

How should I pronounce “D/XYZ”? Here’s their monstrously fatuous answer:

D/XYZ (pronounced Destiny) is bridging the gap between the public and private markets, broadening access to transformative innovation that, over the past two decades, has been limited to a select few.⁵

I admit, I’m unsure how the pronunciation of “destiny” differs from “Destiny,” but there’s undoubtedly an answer that one of the flibbertigibbets employed at D/XYZ (pronounced Destiny) can supply.

I’ve previously described the company name “Hugging Face” as “idiotically whimsical.” I’d like to clarify that Hugging Face’s idiotically whimsical name is only mildly annoying compared to the noxious nincompoopery perpetrated by D/XYZ (pronounced Destiny).

If D/XYZ (pronounced Destiny) gets to choose arbitrary mappings between symbols and pronunciation, then in the spirit of “broadening access to transformative innovation,” so should I.

Here’s my choice: D/XYZ (pronounced STOO-PID).