A lot of us have probably read the recent item of the very young school-going kid who meant in his essay to write that he lived in a ‘terraced’ house but spelled the word ‘terrorist’ instead. We also are aware through media reports how that episode panned out for all concerned: the caught-in-the-spotlight boy, his caught-with-their-mouths-agape parents, the caught-up-in-the-times nervy investigation units.
Harking back to the 1600s – a time that was to produce some great writers and great writing – one of the stalwarts of that day, a giant in fact even today, so great that he has an entire library shelf dedicated to his works, yes the legendary W.S., well, he got one of his coy characters, Juliet, to ask her beau, Romeo, in a play: ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ The name of the play, of course, was…correct, you guessed it! No caught-up-in-the-times nervy sleuthing required.
What’s in a name?
Today, evidently, a lot. A terrace by any other name may not sound as charming to the ears, may not produce in the mind’s eye that grandeur, that panorama, that vista one might envisage when up on a terrace. If one substituted ‘terrorist’ for ‘terrace’ every time one could actually play an amusing game to while away the dreariness. But these are changed times – neither amusing, nor dreary. What happened to that kid and his folk was neither droll nor tedious. One moves elsewhere if one is in search of humour, or even a smile.
On the subject of names, again, in this day and age it may not sound like high-comedy to play on them. Names, that is. Still, the newspapers do it today as they’ve been doing it for a thousand years.
Wiki has a few examples to show what some theorists believe: that there is a connection between a person’s name and what he might end up doing as a profession. There’s a word for this – an aptronym.
Famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (Joy) postulated the Pleasure Principle; his colleague, Carl Jung (Young), the principle of rebirth and their colleague Alfred Adler (Eagle) wrote of the Will to Power. Three books and their authors are cited in Wiki, too. ‘Pole Positions – The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet’ by Daniel Snowman; ‘London Under London – A Subterranean Guide’ by Richard Trench’, and, brace yourself, ‘The British Journal of Urology’ by A.J. Splatt and D. Weedon.
Again, one can’t help feeling Shakespeare may have got it wrong. Jenny Rose, for example might have serious misgivings about being renamed Jenny Weedon. It doesn’t smell the same, does it? But that’s not to belittle Mr. Weedon in any respect.
English, South African, West Indian and Australian cricketers’ names have lent themselves over the years to some glorious, some inglorious headlines. They are the fodder that headline writers salivate over, I’d imagine. Here’s one from 1969’s Auckland test that some think is badly contrived and others consider clever: ‘New Zealand Bowling Butchered by Nurse, Peppered by Basil.’ The reference, of course, is to two West Indies’ batting greats Basil Butcher and Seymour Nurse. Like them, the Flower brothers from Zimbabwe, the cricket-playing Cooks, the Priors, the Swans, the Clarkes, the Sidebottoms, the Butts, the Millers, the Fletchers, the Shepherds, the Bishops, the Abbots, the Willeys, the Holdings…have all lent their names, albeit unwittingly, to a joke on the telly commentary or in the newspaper.
Indian names, thus far, have been relatively safe from punsters and wags. It’s a challenge itself to pronounce Venkataraghavan so playing on the word becomes the equivalent of Everest-difficult. Ditto, Gavaskar or Vengsarkar or Tendulkar. But now, we have Gurkeerat Singh Mann. And after the recent ODI series loss to Australia, the Aussie quip is: India have only one Mann. (The response to that, by a clever Indian wag, is: And Australia, sadly, have none.) Oddly enough, you might say the scores are even after that.
