If every age comes to have a name — the Industrial Age, Dark Ages, the Age of Enlightenment, etc. — then I offer this contender for our times: the Age of Misbegotten, Mawkish and Misleading Titles.

My local newspaper, the News & Observer (proposed slogan: “Doing more with less, and there’s less every day!”), has had beaucoup examples of bad titles lately. In fact, the N&O’s political blog, Under the Dome, has offered a series of posts about the titles attached to legislative bills. As Dome points out, some of those titles seek to disguise the bill’s actual intent (”The Healthy Youth Act,” for instance, which is simply yet another sex education bill sure to raise conservative hackles), while others engage in shameless public relations spin (”Taxpayers Protection Act,” which doesn’t actually protect you, but only seeks to limit the state’s plunder of your wallet).

Read all the posts. They’re a nifty primer on the Orwellian thinking behind the titling of our laws.

Then there was this piece about the guy who’s letting the public vote on his job title. Among the contenders, according to his Web site, are “Grand Poombah” and “Like Mark Zuckerberg, but Better.” If either of those titles tell you what the guy actually does, then you’re a more accomplished semanticist than I am. (Or maybe a better semiotician. Damn, titles are hard sometimes.)

The article also mentions a fellow who formed his own advertising agency, and awarded himself the title “lead guitar.” Problem is, lead guitarists aren’t always the top guy in a group. Remember, George Harrison played lead guitar for the Beatles, but he was the third banana in a four-man band. And Slash was always No. 2 behind Axl.

I might call the lead guitar guy when I finally get around to putting together an Archie Bell and the Drells tribute band. But why would I call him for advertising?

A college basketball coach in Mississippi, whose team won fewer games this year than in the two previous seasons, decided there should be no reward for mediocrity. He returned the $25,000 bonus he’d been given, saying:

“I really compare it to AIG. Why would I take a bonus when we went backwards?”

Refreshing, eh? Nothing could be nicer, in these troubled times, than the sight of someone in a high-profile job cutting back so we wage-slaves can see that sacrifice is shared by all. Hopefully, others will follow.

Uh, not Congress. According the Bloomberg News:

The U.S. Senate last month passed a measure limiting “luxury” spending for corporate travel by recipients of federal bailout funds. Two weeks later, about two dozen senators of both parties left town for political meetings on the Florida coast.

And not the Wake County Board of Commissioners. According to the News & Observer:

Wake commissioners split 4-2 down party lines Monday, with the Democratic majority voting down a proposal to cut the elected board members’ salaries by 10 percent.

Despite losing the vote, Republicans Joe Bryan and Tony Gurley both said they would voluntarily give back a tenth of their commissioners’ salaries — a portion in line with the cuts faced by county departments due to the poor economy and declining tax revenues.

The commissioners voting “no” to the pay-cut proposal explained their reasoning thusly: (1) “I’m not going to play these games.” (2) “I’m the brokest commissioner on this board.” (3) It could start rumors among county employees that their pay might be cut, too. (4) Commissioners already make enough sacrifices. (5) It would save only $3,731, and what difference could that make?

Boy. That feel-good moment from the basketball coach didn’t last long, did it?

A rumor floated into my email inbox a few weeks ago, reporting that a group of investors was negotiating to buy the News & Observer. It was wishful thinking, as far as I could tell, probably the metastatic offspring of the common refrain that often pops up whenever local readers discuss the N&O’s woes: Why doesn’t somebody buy the paper and free it from McClatchy’s troubled clutches?

It is my sad duty to report that it won’t happen. Investors will take custody of the N&O only when they pry it from McClatchy’s cold, dead fingers.

There are two reasons for this. First, McClatchy — for all its financial woes — is under no immediate pressure to raise cash. The single most important number to McClatchy right now is its leverage (loosely defined as the ratio between the company’s debt and its earnings). And to call it important isn’t just my analysis, by the way. McClatchy itself, in its annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year, said that staying within bank-imposed leverage limits “is critical to the Company’s operations.”

Everything McClatchy does these days is in service to that ratio, which calls for debt not to exceed seven times earnings. In its latest SEC filing, McClatchy reported that its debt was just a little more than five times earnings — well below its limit. In short, McClatchy won’t sell the N&O because it doesn’t have to. The company has breathing room.

But what McClatchy also has is $3 billion worth of obligations, two-thirds of which is long-term debt. (The remainder is pension obligations, workers comp, etc.) There’s a relatively small debt payment due in April, but starting in 2011 the big bills start rolling in. Unless McClatchy sees its revenue turn around dramatically in the next two years, it’ll have to consider selling assets to raise cash — assets like the N&O.

Before I go further, though, consider this passage from a report in last week’s Wall Street Journal on the sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune, owned by Copley Press:

The Union-Tribune is the country’s 23rd-largest newspaper, with weekday circulation of nearly 270,000.

The deal price wasn’t disclosed, but a person familiar with the matter said it was less than $50 million, a price largely driven by the Copley Press real estate, which includes the complex housing the Union-Tribune and another facility. The value of the assets — even amid a downtrodden real-estate market — gives the buyers some cushion against the struggling newspaper, according to people familiar with the matter.

A newspaper significantly larger than the N&O sold for less than $50 million, mostly on the basis of its real estate holdings. The N&O’s downtown headquarters has an assessed value of $11.6 million, according to tax records. It also owns a parking lot downtown assessed at $417,000 and a distribution center in Garner assessed at $6.6 million. Total those up, and assume that the assessed values reflect an actual market value (they may actually be higher than market value, considering how far real estate has fallen), and it adds up to less than $19 million. Maybe the N&O has other small holdings elsewhere, but this is surely the bulk of its real estate.

Stay with me, there’s a little more math. If McClatchy apportioned its long-term debt equally among its 30 daily papers, each paper would be responsible for nearly $67 million of debt. But that’s not how it works. McClatchy instead expects its bigger papers to do the heavy lifting on paying down the debt. My rough guess is that the N&O, being McClatchy’s sixth-largest paper, is on the hook for at least $100 million (and probably much more) of the debt.

In other words, that’s how much McClatchy would need, at a minimum, to take away from the sale of the N&O. What would a buyer get for $100 million? Nineteen million dollars worth of real estate, and a company whose main business may go the way of the eight-track tape player. You think there are any such buyers out there?

That’s why McClatchy can’t sell the N&O. But someday, the bank might.