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Now there’s a word for you. And it’s a real one! What does it mean? Well, it’s the fear of the number 666 and a town in the US state of Louisiana has won a 40-year campaign to have its telephone prefix changed from the number made infamous in the Book of Revelation (which is the last book in the Bible, if you didn’t already know—which is, of course, unlikely).

The number 666 has long been associated by Christians with the Devil, a figure Pagans will readily tell you they don’t believe in at all and was appropriated from Persia. But the red guy with horns—an acquired image that was and is a medieval-imposed false association with the Pagan deity known as Pan–has been held responsible by Christians for many an urge, crime and natural event for over a millennia.

The most extreme followers of the religion will blame the Devil for their washing machine leaking, resulting in a call to a plumber and a missed prayer meeting (I can personally vouch for having witnessed that example some years ago, a variation on ‘the devil made me do it’). Others blame the Devil for every weather aspect deemed bad, from hurricanes to snow storms. Presumably sunny days come from God, along with ice-cream. Less extreme, though equally fascinating from a sociological and psychological perspective, is the tendency to blame the Devil for illicit love affairs and particularly, in recent years, the discovered homosexual liaisons of senior Church figures in public places such as parks and toilets, people who invariably from the pulpit condemn all practices and feelings deemed queer.

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Christians in the town of Reeves have been up in arms since the early 1960s about being given the prefix 666–the Biblical ‘Number of the Beast’. For the next three months, households will be able to change the first three digits of their phone numbers to 749. The town’s Mayor, Scott Walker, described telephone service provider CenturyTel’s decision as ‘divine intervention’, praising God and blaming the Devil when, in reality, corporate decisions rarely have anything to do with the mythical battle between the forces of good and evil, and everything to do with money and public relations.

Spoiling the guilt association party is the notion that the number 666 may be a mistranslation, and most certainly wasn’t the only number once in circulation that was assigned to the Devil. Oxford University scholars have discovered a 3rd Century papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, which gives the number of the Beast as 616. A manuscript fragment from the 11th Century lists the number as 665.

The traditional number 666 has been an obsession for Christians for centuries. Some scholars believe it to be a reference to the Roman emperor at the time the Book of Revelation was written, either Nero or Diocletian. Both men put large numbers of Christians to death. Using the Jewish system of Gematria, in which each letter is given a number, either name can add up to 666.