 Until recently, it was generally held that the name theory was ‘an utter failure’ (Saka 1998, p. 114), of interest only as showing us how not to theorize about quotation. In recent years, however, there have been at least two defenses of something like the name theory (Gomez-Torrente 2013 and Johnson 2018). We here present the reasons the name theory was long taken to be a non-starter, as well as the responses to these problems by the authors mentioned above.