Jonathan Taylor, who previously revisited John McPhee on New York City’s greenmarkets and strongly suggested that the city install skybridges, writes:
If it’s really the end of an era for Wall Street, it will also be the end of a perennial New Yorker trope.
Recently subsumed brokerage Merrill Lynch, a metonym for Wall Street (itself a metonym!), was for decades an absurdly frequent subject of New Yorker Talk pieces and cartoons, which exhibited an inexhaustible fascination with the length and euphony of its name in its various iterations, particularly “Merrill Lynch, Pierce Fenner & Beane.”
Should that not be “Merrill, Lynch, Pierce….”? It should not, and an amusing December 27, 1947, Talk piece, “Fine Point,” settled it. The erroneous placement of a comma where it didn’t belong had led to a “warm discussion” among magazine proofreaders. (Most likely it was in a September 13, 1947, cartoon, in which a woman asks her investment counselor, “When you say Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Beane recommend a certain stock, do you mean it’s unanimous or just a simple majority?”)
“The situation set us to worrying,” wrote Talk, “and since, with us, to worry is to act, we sent a man downtown to investigate.” This man soon enough got co-founder (or “lead-off man,” as it was put) Charles Merrill on the horn. Merrill told him that when he and Edmund Lynch founded Merrill Lynch & Co. in 1914, they simply took after the ethereal example of J.P. Morgan affiliates (Morgan Grenfell, Drexel Morgan & Co.) that had no need for the workaday comma.
And in the discreet banking world, it seems that it can be wiser not to tip one’s hand punctuationally. “Fine Point” goes on to explain that when Merrill Lynch & Co. merged with another firm in 1940, there was a New York law forbidding a partnership from including a dead person in its name. This was initially thought to mean that the new company could not retain Lynch, who had died in 1938, in its name. But another law did permit the name of a firm to be a component of a name of a partnership; some syntactically wise lawyers surmised that, without a comma, “Merrill Lynch” could be construed as the name of a firm, rather than simply the names of two partners. “Otherwise, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane would be called something else today, maybe Chuck,” the mag quipped.
The next name change, to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, prompted another investigation, in the February 15, 1958, issue. It was a small loss to the culture: “The explosive, easily rhymed climax provided by ‘Beane’ has long been a boon to writers of songs and gags.” A year later a 1959 piece titled “& Beane?” looked in on the departed partner, Alph Beane, who had co-founded a new firm, J.R. Williston & Beane Inc.
I wondered if Beane had perhaps shown superhuman prudence in bailing out of Merrill Lynch a whole half century before Merrill’s demise. But his 1994 Times obit notes, “In the fall of 1963, Williston & Beane began to have financial difficulties when it failed to meet capital requirements at the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange after the bankruptcy of a client, the Allied Crude Vegetable Oil and Refining Company, which was unable to meet margin calls on soybean and cottonseed futures clients”; it was absorbed by another brokerage.

Would Will Eisner, who coined the phrase “sequential art” to describe comics, include fumetti? Paging Scott McCloud! (And click to enlarge!)

More by Paul Morris: “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale (and free download) at Lulu.

Paul writes about today’s cartoon:
Is it just me, or is the American public not angry enough about this whole bailout? What we need is an “Eric Praline-like”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Praline character, high-pitched and indignant, to go before the President, or Congress, or both, and ask what in bleedin’ hell is going on: “Look, it’s people like you what cause unrest.” “A letter to America attributed to John Cleese”:http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/personal/john-cleeses-letter-to-america.html is now considered to be apocryphal, but nevertheless makes interesting reading. As a “Sarvik.com article”:http://www.sarvik.com called “Between Iraq and a Hard Place” has pointed out, “since the bank rescue package will not include assistance for The People, and because society at large will demand assistance for them as well, bigger government or/and higher taxes to stimulate the system through public works are inevitable in one form or another. Increased taxation is the domain of Democrats, and that’s why they will ultimately win the 2008 Presidential election. The Republicans won’t want to confuse their reputation by being forced to create another New deal administration, as it will make it extremely difficult in future to campaign on a platform of conservatism and small government.”
Also, check out Cleese’s “official site!”:http://www.thejohncleese.com/ And click on the cartoon to enlarge it!

More by Paul Morris: “The Wavy Rule” archive; “Arnjuice,” a wistful, funny webcomic; a smorgasbord at Flickr; and beautifully off-kilter cartoon collections for sale (and free download) at Lulu.