Companies rename themselves for any number of reasons. Sometimes they want to direct attention to a fundamental change in what they do. Sometimes new management simply want to announce their arrival. And sometimes (think Philip Morris to Altria), they want to cover their tracks.
This seems to be the case with Blackwater, the U.S. military security firm that quietly changed its name to the benign and in their own words "meaningless" Xe two months ago. Any rebranding risks effacement of brand equity, but when effacement is the primary objective, most companies seem to believe that the more meaningless the new name, the better.
Which is a shame. Evil henchmen have a long and inglorious history, reflecting the eternal need of rulers to shed blood while avoiding the spatter. When the cry rolls down from the castle, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest/little girl/country?", who will respond to the call?
Why not Wickersham, Wickersham & Wickersham, Royal Purveyors of Mayhem Most Subtile Since 1798? Or if you want something more Web 2.0, names like Iago, Flying Monkeys and Turd Blossom prove that unscrupulous doesn't have to mean humorless. (Nor must it imply a tin ear, though most henchman themes seem to be variants on the Song of the Volga Boatmen. Even the Oompa Loompa song. This may be because good henchmen, like good proletarians, are required to joyfully signal that they have no individual identity.)
Now, Oompa Loompas, while clearly henchmen, are more creepy than evil, reminding us that the defining characteristic of henchmen is not evil but amoral obsequiousness. The word appears in the 14th-century as an apparent compound based on Old English hengst/horse, so the original henchman was probably a groom or stablehand.
Hengst still means "stallion" in German and Dutch and is associated with male sexuality through related forms like hengstig/horny and hengstenbal/stag party. (Which speaks to the Oompa Loompa connection.) And as a sidenote to that sidenote, Hengst and Horsa (also meaning horse) were 5th-century mercenary brothers from Jutland who were invited to England by the Celtic Britons to fight off their native enemies, the Picts. Mission accomplished, H&H liked it so much they decided to stay, invited a bunch of other Germanic tribes over, and took the country away from under their chagrined Celtic hosts. The Blackwater of their time, the Jutes may have been first on the ground, but were dropped from the letterhead when the Angles and Saxons later instituted an ambitious but ultimately successful rebranding effort.
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