There is a women’s clothes shop in town that gained national notoriety last year due to its name – Isis. Some rather stupid trolls on social media accused the shop, and by association the owner, with having links with Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East. The idea is completely absurd – the boutique was clearly named after the Egyptian goddess, and has been there for a number of years, since well before the rise of ISIS, IS, ISIL, Daesh, or whatever the papers have decided to call them this week.
I think the owner quite liked the publicity at first- it’s not often that a small clothes shop in Malvern gets into the national press, and I’m sure it got increased footfall for a while as a result. However, she seems to have caved in to the pressure and decided to distance herself from the unfortunate associations. I suppose that some people are just so stupid they can’t or won’t distinguish between innocent uses of the word and ones with more sinister overtones. Anyway, I went past the shop today and it’s been renamed Juno, after another ancient goddess, Roman this time. I wouldn’t have said that they were entirely equivalent goddesses, and indeed the later Romans worshipped both of them, clearly seeing them as distinct. However, I expect that they’re similar enough for the purpose of lending their name to a clothes shop.
I imagine that the owner is now fervently hoping that no fundamentalist group springs up calling itself JUNO.
