What's in a name?

A good friend asked about the name "Agaric," and pointed out that the top search hits were for a subset of agaric mushrooms, called "fly agaric," which are historically considered hallucinogenic (though the U.S. government doesn't seem to have gotten around to declaring them illegal).

I had only looked at the straight definition before, on my Mac's built-in Oxford American Dictionary:

But anyone who googles agaric (and who won't?) will associate us with "drugs" I guess.

So...

I have long hair, work in the Agaric Design Collective, went to UMass-Amherst, support the Narco News Bulletin, and believe very strongly in decriminalizing any action that at worst hurts only the doer...

I suppose everyone will assume I do drugs, as a guy on a bus to St. Louis did a few years ago based on nothing but slightly long hair I guess. Yet the ironic truth is I've never done illegal drugs, and don't do much of the legal ones like alcohol and caffeine.

Not that that should matter one way or another. But Agaric Design doesn't want drug prohibitionists avoiding us just because we have a better name than Microsoft or iCore, for heaven's sake.

But the Agaric Design Collective has an easy solution to those who would google before using a dictionary: make sure Agaric Design is listed first for "agaric" searches. That way we define it (and I get revenge on Wikipedia for deleting my disambiguation link to Agaric Design as 'commercially motivated' or something... I mean, what about Apple computer? Who'd'a thunk Wikipedia would pick on the little guy.)

The other part of the solution is to be so well known no one thinks to ask what the name means. (Kodak, all the Japanese companies, and Chrysler - named after Walter Percy, company founder, by the way - come to mind.)

For the obvious analogy, a search for "coca" brings Coca-Cola just as far down the page as we are, but no one's connecting them to such negative things as, say, the billion dollars a year the U.S. pays to, in part, dump herbicide by airplane on farming families in Colombia.

I wonder how many other brand names have definitions the corporation that owns them would rather not have people think about?

Maybe Pepsi: "pepsin |?pepsin| noun Biochemistry the chief digestive enzyme in the stomach, which breaks down proteins into polypeptides." Heh.

In short, Agaric's a cool name.