Asking what was in a name, Juliet sighed on her balcony that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. By which she dismissed the nominal basis of identity, a declaration to which Gertrude Stein would add the tautological postscript in her 1913 poem, 'Sacred Emily,' that 'a rose is a rose is a rose', a reiteration Umberto Eco echoed in the concluding Latin epigram of his 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose: 'Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus' - the pristine rose remains only in name, we are left only with naked names.
Confronted with such flowery verbiage, the current tenant of the White House might mistake the rosy-eyed Juliet with Juliet Huddy, an ex-Fox News anchor, who alleged that POTUS had made osculatory contact with her in an elevator, and conflate Gertrude-Eco into a portmanteau illegal immigrant, who should be ICE-d.
