Pride comes before a fall, so the saying goes. Which makes it an odd choice for the name of the London 2012 Olympic mascot, a grinning white lion with a mane of red, white and blue hair. It will be an awful moment when an eager British athlete tumbles at the final hurdle while being cheered on by some poor sucker in a lion suit with "Pride" emblazoned across his chest.

Soon, Pride will be adorning much of the £1bn worth of merchandise that the organisers hope to sell - keyrings, pens, soft toys, the lovely "Pride the Lion 3D charm accessory". (As far as I can tell, the only defining feature that makes the "charm accessory" 3D is that it is an object rather than a drawing, in the same way as any object is 3D. As in "I'm walking in my 3D shoes to the 3D shop to buy a 3D pint of milk", etc. Anyway.)

Why a lion? Have you ever seen a lion on this island, apart from the mournful ones at the zoo? I realise that a sheep might not summon the competitive spirit in quite the same way, but it would feel truer, more genuinely reflective of our national spirit and range of indigenous wildlife. We're pretending to be something that we are not, dressing up in an elaborate costume to hide our flaws and weaknesses. No one will fall for it: underneath that lion suit will be an overenthused volunteer, sweating like a sumo wrestler and wishing he'd opted to be a steward at the gymnastics instead.

But the name is the real problem. I wonder why the marketing powers that be chose it. Do we pride ourselves on being proud? I don't think so. If anything, we are a chastened nation now, with our economy on the slide and our football team a spent force. Pride isn't a virtue, though it was once: the word comes from the Old English prud, prute, which means "brave or valiant" and derives from the Old French prud. The negative inflection, where to “be proud" is to have an overly high opinion of yourself, is said to reflect the Anglo-Saxons' opinion of Norman knights, who called themselves preux. You see? The French are proud, not we. If anything, we should be proud of our humility, our ability to laugh at ourselves. But I suppose a sheep called Irony doesn't have quite the same ring, or merchandising potential.