Last week, the variety of white fish known as pollack was renamed Colin by Sainsbury's. Apparently, over many sad and fearful years, customers have just been too embarrassed to say the word pollack. So they have continued to play it safe, and request cod instead - despite it being three times more expensive than pollack, and at risk from over-fishing. They asked for cod, that is, until Sainsbury's stepped in, with its “Colin” solution.

“We want to highlight that there are species to eat other than cod and haddock, which are just as tasty and often cheaper. We urge everyone to try ‘Colin and chips' on a Friday,” Alison Austin, environment manager at Sainsbury's, said.

The accompanying press release later revealed that Colin is French for pollack, and actually pronounced co-lan. Initially, the logic of effortfully dumping pollack - presumably because it sounds a bit like bollock - and then drafting in colin - which sounds a bit like colon - is baffling; but I'm sure Sainsbury's has some high-level long-game we're not yet aware of. Perhaps it is part of what seems to be a growing campaign to slowly name everything in Britain after an extremely normal man in his late thirties/early forties. With pollack now called Colin, and the UK Gold channel renamed Dave, I fully expect to be riding around in an Ian, drinking mugs of hot Malcolm and filling in my online Tim forms with my Mikes before the year is out.

Of course, this isn't the first time that mankind has gone all Istanbul Constantinople on a fish. Until recently, monkfish used to be known as headfish, until someone realised that this was really playing up the delicious beast's gigantic weak point: it looks like George Melly six weeks after he died. Similarly, the popularity of the pilchard was suffering a severe decline in fortune, until someone scrapped the whole “pilchard” thing (conjures up mushy tomato-ey bone potion in a tin), and started remarketing it as “the Cornish sardine” (invokes noble, darting, silver fish from holiday-land), instead.

And of course, why shouldn't we rename other species, as and when we choose? After all, we named them in the first place. It's not like they leapt up out of the sea, shouting “I'm a prawn!”, and then jumped back in again. We could rename every creature on the Earth and not only is there literally nothing they can do about it, but they wouldn't even care, either. We're playing this “naming the animals” game totally on our own. Scientifically speaking, they just don't give a monkeys.

And what we name the fish of our planet reveals one of the great truths of our species. English is a language that has given us the words coracle, opalescent, smite, sesquipedalian, bosky, wedding-cake and zoo.

Taking this into consideration, let us now peruse a list of names we have given to fish: gudgeon, gurnard, pilchard, smelt, daggertooth pike conger, mullet, lungfish. These are, without doubt, horrible names. More than horrible - disturbing. Just typing the word lungfish has made me retch a little. We might just as well have fishes named headcrust, gutbug, oozehole and brown illness. The majority of fish names were bequeathed by those who deal with them most - fishermen. And the names fishermen have chosen articulate what we all know, deep down in our hearts, to be true: WE HATE FISH.

Human beings hate fish. We are scared of them. They alarm us. When it comes right down to it, we just don't really want to be near them. While there might be the odd freshwater fish that looks quite noble - few would slight a mighty silver salmon, say, or object to the blameless life of a beck trout - the ones in the sea are just total bastards. British maritime waters are stuffed with hideous bone-cages covered in eyes and slime, rendered in various dreich streaks of brown, brown and grey; faces torqued by the pressure of the deep sea. They are terrifying. There's things down there that make Picasso look like a photo-realist, trying to cheer up a sad child.

Farther afield, in the Tropics, the fish may become more colourful - blue, say; or that one off Finding Nemo - but this small bonus is immediately nullified by the fact that they are studded with poisonous spikes, have teeth in their urethra, or wish to devour you by luring you into a gigantic clam. While I allow that this may not be totally true, on the other hand, it very well may be. Ultimately, we don't know. We never really get a proper look at them, because we only ever get to encounter them when we're underwater, ie, drowning.

Periodically, during debates on the future of the space programme, someone will mention that while we consider hurling billions of dollars on voyaging light years to other planets, more than 90 per cent of our own planet still remains unexplored: the oceans. A few hundred miles off our coastlines, there are vast underwater mountains and chasms - seething volcanic vents, bubbling soup-warm nutrients - that we have never charted.

What that means in a nutshell, then, is that those finned bastards could have developed hundred-mile-wide, animatronic killing robot Krakens, and fish-bombs full of potent fish-essence - that clings to the skin of the victim for ever, rendering them wholly isolated by society - and we wouldn't have a clue about it. Fish could be up to anything. It's not like they don't have the motivation to attack - we've filled their world with poo, nets and rusting Russian nuclear submarines, turned half their population into catfood, and seem to go out of our way to be offensive even to the underwater creatures with good PR, like whales. Plus, no shark ever saw a penny of copyright for Jaws. It's an emotional, moral and legal minefield.

If you talk about this with a group of people for more than ten minutes, you realise that we all quietly regard the oceans with borderline hysteria. What goes on down there? What are they all doing? Even though lions and mosquitoes and, as we now know thanks to QI, donkeys kill millions of people a year, there's something ultimately less terrifying about them compared with fish. At least they have the decency to breathe air. Fish don't even do that, the demented, heinous, bewildering items.

Yes, there is one thing that is quite clear. It is not embarrassment that has caused us to rename the pollack something cheering, and human, like Colin. It is fear.

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