Dialogue: A name to put fear into hearts of men

By JOE BENNETT

I have never met the man who bears the name, but nor, I suspect, have many of the people who thronged Christchurch's Colombo St on Tuesday. The banner headline in The Press announced "In Todd They Trust" and 100,000 people took to the streets to prove the blasphemous punster right.

The 100,000 came to greet and thank and celebrate a team of rugby players, but mainly they came to gawp at Todd. They wore Todd masks and they prostrated themselves at his feet and they shouted his name.

Juliet, of course, thought names to be of no account.

"What's in a name?" she asked. "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet."

For romantic reasons, Juliet was hardly neutral on the subject of names, but anyway she was wrong. We wouldn't plant a rose called skunk.

Names matter. When Adam was granted dominion over the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea and everything else that crept, ran, flew, swam or sat in a deckchair, the first thing he did was to name them. Names enable us to grasp the world.

If we do not know a person's name, we are at a disadvantage. Without a name we have to deal with the thing itself rather than the label, and we find that hard. But there would be few houses in New Zealand that Todd Blackadder could walk into this week to find that no one knew his name.

And what a name. I know little about rugby and I care less, but I know a good name when I see one.

Todd is strong. Its single syllable leaves nothing to debate. It's all consonants, and consonants are the bones of words. Where vowels merely slide from the mouth, consonants do things. The letters T and D are plosives. To say them we have to curl the tongue against the roof of the mouth and then slap it down with a gust from a throat like a possum's hiss.

No girl could be called Todd. Girls' names may begin with T but they taper into open vowels or a lingering sinuous y - Tina, Teresa, Tracy.

The word Todd suggests much. It echoes plod, and the image of an old-fashioned rural policeman: unspectacular, honest and earnest. But it holds hints of toddle too, and toddler, the innocent child, the one who enjoys life but needs guidance, is unstable but enthusiastic and generous and wide-eyed in a manner that stretches our hearts. No wonder the women swoon.

Though Todd is good, Blackadder is better. Like Todd, Blackadder is a clusterbomb of consonants. It packs another bunch of Ds, coupled now with the explosive B and the cackle of the K.

The rhythm of the whole name throws the emphasis on to the word "Black" and no word in the language is darker. Black is the absence of light, the colour of spite. Black thoughts, black deeds, black looks, the black heart of the blackguard.

Then add the adder. An adder is a viper, a venomous snake. After the strong stress of "Black," the double syllable of adder rattles like a threat. Come no nearer, I've got fangs.

Every component of the name is right. Each verbal building block is Anglo-Saxon and forthright as a punch. No Latinate abstractions, no sliding, doubtful vowels.

And now Todd Blackadder has been promoted to a position more eminent than that of Prime Minister. And the people have embraced him.

For in a world of change, where nothing is as once it was, Todd Blackadder returns us to certainty. With his rugged temperance, like the Port Hills on Prozac, his lopsided smile, the lips pulled to one side by what looks to be a duelling scar on the cheek, his monosyllabic eloquence in which there seems to be no editing between heart and mouth, he resurrects the old New Zealand from a sea of cappuccino.

Rugged as the landscape, resolute as a pioneer, liking his going tough, giving no fig for money but everything for honour, he thinks a canape is something you shelter under to watch the rugby. He's as New Zealand as a roast. His heart is as big as his boots and his boots are size 17.

As I said at the start, I do not know Todd Blackadder, so I do not know if what I have said about him is true. But I think people think it is true and I think they think it is good, and so it is both true and good.