Ohhhh! now this is quite intuitive to me. When I first tried pmap this is what I expected the behavior to be. I was immediately flummoxed that I had lost names. I was a little confused by this line in the map documentation:
.l- A list of lists. The length of .l determines the number of arguments that .f will be called with. List names will be used if present.
because the docs say "list names will be used if present" I had expected I could do exactly what you illustrate above without wrapping the input in a list()
This conversation is VERY helpful. Thank you.