Pond-erous Name Only Daffy Could Love : Disney Has Hatched a Moniker Most Fowl for Anaheim Arena That Waddles off the Tongue

Be it Mighty, or merely mallard, you’ll find no music in a duck.

The folks at Disney, who are bringing a hockey franchise called the Mighty Ducks to Anaheim, have exercised a contractual prerogative to recommend that the city’s new arena be called “the Pond in Anaheim.” If the arena operators go along, it will prove that all concerned have no more music in their souls than do our web-footed friends.

“The Pond in Anaheim” is a name you might expect a developer to hit on as a sales ploy. Got a block of nondescript condos to unload? Give it a hoity-toity, upscale-sounding moniker and maybe you can create the illusion that buyers will be acquiring a piece of a country estate instead of compartments in a rabbit hutch.

Calling the arena the Pond won’t cost it any musical bookings, because attracting big-name pop talent to hockey rinks has nothing to do with nomenclature. The operative rule here is “build it and they will come,” as long as they’re getting paid a bundle.

My objection to “the Pond” is not practical but purely aesthetic. For Walt’s sake, give this name more thought.

Of course, if we do get stuck with the Pond, we’ll just have to make the best of it. If nothing else, the name should give nasty rock critics like me plenty of writing angles. Expect negative reviews to be asplash in Pond-specific poison ink.

Bands that fly Confederate flags or indulge in misogyny, gay-bashing, gratuitous bad-boy antics and sundry other stupidity will be known as Pond scum. Algae could figure into this, too.

We will dismiss as pond-erous or stagnant any act that puts forth a listless effort.

Woe betide Brits who falter in the house that Quack built. We’ll have to point out that these heroes crossed the Big Pond only to take a dive in the little one.

Bad musicians will sink or founder in the Pond. Really bad ones will leave it polluted. Get used to reading leads like “The only thing that saved Band X from drowning in the Pond Saturday night was the fact that it filled the place with so much untreated sonic sewage, not even Jimmy Hoffa’s concrete shoes could have sunk in it.” Folks, this pond-tificating is gonna get ugly.

Ogden Entertainment, builder and operator of the arena, does have veto power over the name Disney has chosen, but it may not want to offend its key tenant. If the Mighty Ducks’ keepers are intent on foisting the Pond on the public, we can’t stop them. But let them be prepared to swallow a bellyful.

What’s truly galling is that “Anaheim Arena”--which is what most sensible people would assume you’d call an arena in Anaheim--would be a beauty of a name, a lyrical little phrase that, far from being a ready-made butt for ridicule, almost begs to be sung.

But Jack B. Lindquist, president of Disneyland and chairman of the Mighty Ducks, has opined that the Pond represents a big improvement over Anaheim Arena.

“There seems to be general agreement that Anaheim Arena might have been too dull, not imaginative enough as a name,” Lindquist said.

It seems that the Disney contingent is so caught up in the gimmickry of hyping and selling that it has lost the ability to listen. Don’t think of Anaheim Arena from Disney’s perspective, which turns a name into nothing but a mercantile device. Think of it in the way you think of your own name: as an identity, as language, as a sound to hearken to.

Anaheim Arena. Say it out loud. Say it slowly. Hear the sounds as they roll off your tongue and lips.

Two words, one following the other in a sure, steady cadence of symmetrical, three-beat steps.

Two words, bound by an attractive alliteration of A’s.

Two words, dancing gracefully together to a harmony of internal rhyme, partnering those eager, echoing A’s with long, sturdy ‘I’ and ‘E’ sounds.

Two words that mean exactly and unmistakably what they say.

Spare us your “dull” and “not imaginative enough,” Jack. Anaheim Arena isn’t just a name. It’s music.

The Disney people may know movies and merchandising and amusement parks. But they need to bone up on arena and stadium lore. Many of the greatest indoor and outdoor venues in America have names that emphasize the beauty of rhyme and alliteration, as Anaheim Arena does.

Consider this: the Rose Bowl by any other name would not sound as sweet.

The hard-edged sound of Yankee Stadium stands as forthright and shoulder-to-shoulder straight as the pin stripes worn by the great baseball teams that played there.

Ebbets Field in Brooklyn was a cozy little park with a name that projected intimacy through its soft, subtle sounds.

True, Dodger Stadium doesn’t have much of a ring to it, but many fans with poetic souls know it by the lovely locution of its famous location: Chavez Ravine.

Noblest of all is that most famous of all indoor arenas, New York’s Madison Square Garden, a name in which the steady, inexorable march of vowels and consonants is so regal that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d set a play there.

Anaheim Arena could join that august company. The Pond sounds like a place where you’d film parts II through X of a “Bad News Bears” knockoff.