In 1977, fish merchant Lee Lantz traveled to Chile and "discovered" the toothfish, a species the locals deemed too oily to eat. Thirty years and a name change later, Chilean sea bass is so popular with American palates that it's almost on the verge of extinction.

After Canadians developed an oil from the rapeseed plant, they still had to deal with the name. So, in 1988, the FDA approved a name change to Canola oil, and sales shot up.

When the California prune board realized the words "prune" and "laxative" were inextricably linked, they switched to "dried plums" in 2000. People bought it, and in a documented focus group, preferred the taste of dried plums to prunes.

In the 1960s, Frieda Caplan, an American produce importer, changed the name of the Chinese Gooseberry to the Kiwi fruit, after New Zealand's national bird which is also round, brown, and fury. Popularity spiked.

Even though the bony fish known as the dolphin fish was unrelated to the mammal of the same name, diners still balked at ordering it. So in the mid-1980s, restaurants starting using its Hawaiian name—mahimahi—and all thoughts of Flipper were forgotten.

People have a natural bent toward renaming something to make it more palatable. Such an act of renaming—especially in the examples I just mentioned—is relatively harmless. But what about the renaming we do on a more personal level? That can get pretty dangerous, pretty fast. It leads to self-denial, a lack of self-awareness. For example, some of us have a hard time saying, "I'm angry!" We think it's more acceptable to say, "I'm not angry; I'm just frustrated;" or, "I'm not angry; I'm just hurt." The problem is you can change the name however many times you like, and it still doesn't change what it really is. You can fool as many people as you like, but you still know the truth. The worst of it all is that it means you'll never deal with what you need to deal with in your life.