How to interpret the name of an object literally?

Hi, 

I can't seem to figure out how to tell R to stop expanding an object. I
would like to use the literal name rather than the expanded value. 

The issue occurs in a function I've been writing. The problematic part looks
like this: 

# "fund" is a matrix of open, high, low, close, and volume prices
returns <- function(fund)
{
     p_12ago = as.vector(fund[nrow(fund)-252,6])
     perc_diff_12mo = ((p_last - p_12ago) / p_last)*100

#This is the line that's giving me problems:
     funds=c(as.character(fund))

     mo12=c(perc_diff_12mo)
     final_results=data.frame(funds,mo12)
     return(final_results)
}

I can't figure out how to insert the original argument from the function (in
this case the name of the fund). 

Ultimately I want to be able to do returns("GOOG"), and have the output in
this format:

funds     12mo
GOOG     14%

I've tried using as.character(), quote(), dQuote(), sQuote(), gsub(), cat(),
and a bunch of combinations of them. I'm brand new to R, so I apologize if
I'm going about this in the wrong way. 

Thanks in advance for any help!