A doctor I know had a name-change. Instead of being called Grace, she wished to be known as Miriam. I have a nephew who has made a similar decision. This doesn’t just happen to people, male or female.
After the sinking of the Titanic there was a hurried name-change for its sister-ship, still on the stocks. The Gigantic was to be re-named Britannic. Why tempt providence? Better to change the name. Closer to home, pilchards took on a new reputation when they were re-named sardines. Adam, our first taxonomist, hardly encountered such problems. Eden’s animals were his to name as he pleased without the help of textbooks.
Adam’s descendants have enjoyed playing with what was once Adam’s responsibility. What we now call grapefruit first rejoiced in the name Shaddock. Shaddock, a captain in the East Indies fleet, found it and introduced it to Barbados. It then became a pomelo and later graduated to grapefruit status. The Canaries were so called because once the islands – or at least Gran Canaria – were populated by large wild dogs. The name stuck.
Hit-and-miss naming happens all the time. Over the centuries a hazy understanding of animal taxonomy gave way to precise classification. The King James Version of the Bible was content to describe one group of large horned animals as unicorns. We now know that the Indian rhinoceros or the aurochs may have inspired this primitive attempt at nomenclature. The cockatrice and basilisk were also terms familiar to readers of the KJV and its successor, the Revised Version. Similar guesswork meant that the giraffe was cheerfully known as a camelopard. Mermaids were given their fanciful name by sailors who had eyed a lumpish creature called a manatee. (It is not irrelevant to say that lusty matelots at sea for months on end in the days of sail must have developed vivid imaginations.)
Some misnomers linger. We still talk of the lead in a pencil. We talk of dialling a number on the phone. A pen-knife today never cuts a nib. We think of violin strings as cat-gut when they are nothing of the sort. When we come to religious faith, we find that the word ‘Christian’ occurs only three times in the New Testament. What terms did the writers use instead, you may ask? What indeed. That’s a name-change that cries out for attention.
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