Six sixty-six and all that (or, what the hell is marketing eschatology?)

In the beginning was the word... And the word was eschatology Words, according to the late, great novelist, Evelyn Waugh, "should be an intense pleasure, just as leather should be to a shoemaker". Like the apocrj^hal author whose lifetime ambition was to write a book that ended with the word "mayonnaise", or H.L. Mencken's famous contention that the words "cellar door" comprise the most euphonious combination of sounds in the English language (Frumkes, 1995), we have all encountered words which seem to resonate somehow, which inexplicably appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities, which speak to us, so to speak, and which we are determined to work into our work come hell or high water. For example, as a teenage devotee of the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft, I found myself captivated by two of his manifestly favourite words "ululation" and "noisome" both of which I have since managed to smuggle into my publications (the latter, for some strange reason, figures particularly prominently in my book reviews); publications, incidentally, which many people consider to be veritable horror stories in themselves. Similarly, when studying archaeology as an undergraduate student, I was drawn to the early civilizations of the Near East Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, the Hittites, Catal Hliyuk, Mohenjodaro, pre-dynastic Egypt and so on (see Cotterell, 1988). Their appeal, however, lay not in remarkable developments like the domestication of plants and animals, the first stirrings of urban life, the advent of social stratification, the invention of writing or even the establishment of long-distance trade routes, but in the enormous aesthetic store they set by a beautiful blue stone called lapis lazuli, the exquisite sound of which used to roll around in my admittedly empty head. After years of trying and failing, I have finally managed to incorporate lapis lazuli into my academic output, though it necessitated writing a potted history of western civilization in order so to do (Brown, 1995a, p. 29). Another word that has long lurked in the depths of my unconscious is eschatology, the study of endings. I first came across it in the late 1980s while Six sixty-six and all that