Hitchcock
once said: “Revenge is sweet and not fattening.” On deeper analysis, his quip indeed
feels deep. Think about it. When life serves you lemons, the only artificial
sweetener at your disposal is the aspartame of vendetta. When sprinkled in the
right portions, it lightens up the bitterness, melts away the rancour and replaces
the taste of acerbity with the saccharine glee of tit-for-tat.
For
those who want their retribution to linger a little longer, there’s always ‘revenge
naming’. It’s the practice of labelling a living thing or object after a name you despise, so that it acts as a permanent advertisement for whatever you
hate.
Carl
Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, was the pioneer of the concept. When academician
Johann Siegesbeck was busy denouncing his ideas, Linnaeus got even by naming a
foul-smelling yucky weed as ‘Siegesbeckia Orientalis’.
Carl
was not the only one to take veiled jibes at opponents. Out of disdain for Anne
Chisholm - the critic who trashed her novel - Jilly Cooper immortalised a goat in
her next novel by calling it ‘Chisholm’. Understandably Anne wasn’t amused. They say it got her goat!
Revenge
names, sometimes, present a handy valve for jilted wives to ventilate their
anger. When Victoria Bage discovered that her husband had a mistress, she
decided to embarrass him once for all by launching ‘Sarah Coggles’, a fashion store in Yorkshire . Every time someone asked her about the
identity of ‘Sarah Coggles’, she used to regale her audience with salacious tales
of her man’s fling with Miss Coggles!
In
Michael Jackson’s case, it was just the reverse. He punished Diana Ross, the crooner
who spurned him for Norwegian shipping magnate Arne Naess, by releasing the famed
single ‘Dirty Diana’.
Using
names as weapons to take pot shots at hate figures took an altogether political
turn recently, when a French gaming designer created ‘Kill Mittal’. Apparently, his aim was
to demonise Lakshmi Mittal, the billionaire responsible for shutting down steel
plants in France
