ABSTRACT
Mainwaring's 'Pike!' is a reminder that proper names are a special form of reference by which that which is referred to is caught hold of. No wonder we are prone to magic thinking when we believe that names may invoke things. Private Pike, who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, defiantly sings a song that describes Hitler in terms that the Fuhrer might not approve of. The U-boat captain demands his name. Captain Mainwaring jumps in 'Don't tell him, Pike'. It is a line that make one laugh, it also invites to think, about proper names, and perhaps about the profoundest of all mysteries - the relationship between words and the world. Proper names seem the most straightforward, and hence philosophically the least interesting, of all grammatical forms. Proper names would seem to support the much-scorned 'Fido-Fido' theory of language, which claims that the meaning of the word is the object it refers to.
