I got hooked on the Lemony Snicket books while preparing to watch last year’s film (my review), and today my dad pointed something out to me — one possible anagram of “Emily Dickinson” is “Lemony Snickiid”, which is pretty darn close to you-know-what. Interesting, no?
He got this idea from Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, in which one character apparently likes to spell things backwards, and thus finds that “Emily Dickinson” becomes “No Snikcidy Lime”. The similarity between that and Lemony Snicket’s name prompted my dad to try to figure out how close Lemony’s name might be to an anagram of Emily’s.
Given that the books are full of literary and cultural references (the orphans, who bear the surname Baudelaire, are entrusted to a Mr. Poe, and one of the guardians to whom he entrusts them is an Uncle Monty who plays with pythons, etc.) and anagrams (one of Count Olaf’s aliases is “Al Funcoot”), this does not seem like a coincidence to me. Has anyone else ever pointed this out before, I wonder? I couldn’t find anything obvious via Google.
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