SharePoint Lists - how to get Display names

I'm not talking about a person's display name.  I'm taking about the display name of a column in a list. 

When I retrieve the columns from a list, the names of the columns often do not match the column names displayed in SharePoint.  For example:

"Primary Geography Country" is brought in as "Primary Geography Co"

"Launch: Overall Readiness" is brought in as "Launch: Overall_x002"

"Complete" gets brought is as "AllDone" (because I had originally called the column AllDone and then changed it)

"Introduction" gets brought in as "Title" (because I changed Title to Introduction)

I'm looking for a recipe to drill into the nested tables in what is returned for the list to get the display names.  My hope is that these are stored consistently in the data structures, regardless of the type of data each column holds.

Dale