I don't know whether the Child Support Agency is pleased or horrified by its image as the killer quango, but I suspect it is not displeased. It now seems to have the reputation of being as tough as the Mafia, and about as businesslike as a Serbian debt collection agency, and if there is any truth at all in its portrayal as a hard-eyed mercenary army with fingers everywhere, then it will welcome this tough guy image. Certainly, I thought I would never be surprised again by hearing anything about the CSA. I was wrong. The other day I picked up a travel supplement and read this slogan in an advertisement: "Going to Prague on business? Let the CSA handle it for you."

I knew that Prague was getting popular these days, but to have the Child Support Agency muscle in on the act seemed beyond credibility. I read the small print. I was right. It was beyond credibility. CSA stood for Czecho Slovak Airlines. All images of hard-eyed bailiffs flying aeroplanes plastered with pictures of weeping children faded. All ideas of fathers being beaten up in the waiting room at Gatwick till they coughed up fares for their first wife and children...

Poor old Czecho Slovak Airlines. They have fallen prey to the rule that says that no matter how carefully you choose a name, someone else is bound to have thought of it first, or, even worse, it means something you had never thought of. There ought to be a word for this state of having the same name as something else, and I don't mean a word like "homonym". Maybe "cacohonym" would do better. Whatever the word is, it ought to have overtones of horror and disaster, with visions of boards of directors committing mass suicide.

For instance, SAS, the Scandinavian airline, must have gulped when it first found out that there was also a part of the British army with that name, possibly the only part of the British Army with a tougher image than the CSA, but maybe they didn't mind that. The idea of the SAS getting you through is somehow benevolent. The idea of the Child Support Agency getting you to Prague is 100% sinister; Eric Ambler and Len Deighton combined...

Do you remember before AIDS came along, there was a slimming biscuit called something like Ayds? That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I remember Ayds being really quite successful, or at least lying around in great piles on the shelves at Boots, but whatever happened to it? I'm guessing it was either totally withdrawn or renamed or sold off cheap in the Third World as a fattening aid. They do that, you know. I once knew a chap who worked for Heinz who told me that most of the products they devised never got beyond the experimental stage. They would test-market Braille Alphabet Spaghetti or something in the north-west of England, and find that not enough people bought it. So they would sell the vast remaining stocks, or even give it away, to some poor African country that had no need of it...

Do you remember a kind of lorry called Foden? I once read to my delight that 'foden' means something very rude in Portuguese, as a result of which they could never sell any Foden lorries in Portugal. Same in Germany, where Silver Mist means 'silver shit'... It was in one of Adrian Room's dictionaries, I think. Adrian Room was a bloke who ten or twenty years ago produced wonderful dictionaries of confusable words, and brand names, and everything you could think of. I don't think he does it any more. All the great dictionaries these days are done by a chap called Jonathan Green...

I'll tell you another example of unfortunate initials. STD. STD used to stand for Standard Trunk Dialling, which was a meaningless phrase referring to any phone call more than 100 yards away. Then suddenly the people who look after venereal diseases decided they needed a more up-to-date and snappy term for them and came up with Sexually Transmitted Diseases, which was abbreviated to STD. I notice that phone calls aren't called STD any more. I'm not surprised. Any suggestion that you really can catch something off a telephone would fill BT with horror...

It doesn't have to be the same. It only has to be nearly the same. I wager that the name Sean Connery rouses smiles in France, where 'connerie' does mean something off-colour. This was never more true than of telephone numbers, where you only have to have a number very like a popular number to have your life made hell. When I lived in London I had a number almost identical with that of someone called Lady Amabel Lindsay, and once a week I would get phone calls from people so aristocratic that they were incapable of dialling numbers correctly without a servant to help them, braying " Is Amabel there? ". She never was. It took so long to convince these people that they had a wrong number that I took to suggesting to them that Amabel had left the country suddenly and fled to the Costa Brava owing vast sums of money. I don't suppose she minded. Anyone called Amabel must be used to people making mistakes already...

The bloke I really feel sorry for is the actor James Stewart. Not the famous one. The other one. The one who had to change his name because there already was a famous actor called James Stewart. Actually, I don't feel that sorry for him, because he became quite famous under his new name of Stewart Granger. But I do feel sorry for any airline called CSA, or any town in France called Condom, or any French clothing firm called Naff... or, come to that, any actor called Stewart Granger who tried to join Equity...

The Oldie 1994