This work focuses on the statute of metalinguistic terms, with special interest in proper names. As perceived by common sense, this class of words is particularly useful to reinforce a representationistic view of language: here the name, there the named. The contemporary and recurring evidence of failure of this representationistic view invites to alternative reflections on the metalinguistic vocabulary and especially on proper names because the attempts to bring a new insight on the understanding of linguistic significance collide with the persistence of a vocabulary marked by a long hegemony of that language comprehension. The argument proposed here is developed from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Samuel Beckett, especially focusing on the texts of the second Wittengstein and in four Beckett’s novels: Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The choice of these authors and texts has to do with the contemporary richness of approaches between philosophy and literature and also with the special attention both authors dedicated to the question of proper names. It examines a set of relevant texts of Wittgenstein’s mature writings and agrees with his words in Culture and Value (1989, p. 24): philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. On the other hand, from Beckett’s novels this work focuses both the unique onomastic challenges and metalinguistic moments in which characters explicitly deal with the issue of proper names. It is demonstrated that the writings of these two authors, taken as countersigns showing at the same time the wandering of proper names and their paradoxical conservativeness, beckon with the promise of ways to reduce the gap that still seems to separate intellectual understandings of language as a praxis without basis and its effective experience as such.