Abarth — the Scorpion

The scorpion is the other great venom emblem of the motor industry, and its selection here was purely personal: Carlo Abarth took his own star sign and made it a company.

It is a good choice on the merits. Scorpions are eight-legged arachnids that predate the dinosaurs by a very long way, deliver venom through a telson at the end of a segmented tail, and fluoresce a startling cyan under ultraviolet light for reasons still not fully agreed upon. They are also, importantly, small, and the entire Abarth proposition has always been about small things that hurt.

The Ophidiary denies the entry — arachnids and serpents are not in the same phylum, let alone the same argument — but wishes to record admiration for the naming logic. Abarth did not name his firm for what the cars did. He named it for himself, and then spent thirty years making the cars live up to a horoscope.