McLuhan: By the way, there’s an acoustic observation. People’s names have a lot to do with the sort of activities into which they are drawn, gradually. Not necessarily classified, but just acoustically tuned toward certain activities. And so when you look over the names of some of the manufacturing outfits and the names of some of the handicraft people, you’ll see a strange echo going between the name of the man who runs the brick company and the brick. Here’s a weird story. In St. Louis, there is a Prufrock Brick Company. Now, Mr. Eliot was born in St. Louis and his daddy ran a brick company. His father’s company was called the Hydraulic Brick Company. They had a rival called the Prufrock Brick Company and Eliot waited for years to take a pass at Prufrock—his poem on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , this ridiculous guy, this ridiculous name. Let’s circle back to the Greeks and the way in which they
