The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

5. Bell Ringer

Verizon (VZ) is naming names again.

The big New York telco is spinning its yellow pages business off into a new publicly traded company. Shareholders next month will get a dividend of shares in the new concern. Verizon gets to focus on its core telecom business.

You may not find the yellow pages terribly exciting, but Verizon begs to differ. Profoundly, it has dubbed the spinoff company Idearc.

Pronounced "EYE'-dee-ark," the name will help "differentiate it from other publishers in the industry," Verizon says of Idearc.

Of course, Verizon knows all about being different. It was just six short years ago that the former Bell Atlantic decided that its name just wasn't cutting it. So it changed to one that was widely derided at the time for its utter strangeness.

"Verizon," the company said back in April 2000, "signifies a company that will provide customers with both stability and a forward-looking vision."

Now, that bold vision has expanded to encompass even more made-up words.

"A combination of the words 'idea' and 'arc,'" Verizon explained Wednesday, "Idearc symbolizes how the company connects buyers and sellers through robust content available across multiple media."

That's one way to describe big lists of phone numbers.

Dumb-o-Meter score: 75. Here's how Verizon explains Idearc's tri-color logo: "Gray links with its print product design, green to its industry-leading SuperPages.com service and blue to the future.

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