names
A renaming of the already named
A crumpled drawing
Names vs. The Nothing
My name
Take your names with you
No Smoking
Port furniture
All the miscellaneous fittings and fixtures on wharves and piers and elsewhere in nautical neighborhoods are known by the charming term port furniture.
On the Winds
An Article by Justin E. H. SmithOn the Situations and Names of the Winds is the title of a fragment of a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, most likely written by a later author of the Peripatetic school. The two-page work identifies and briefly describes the names not just of the four anemoi, but gives a wind-name to each of the twelve points of the so-called “wind-rose”, slightly less poetically the “compass rose”, which is the figure seen on classical nautical charts and maps that shows the cardinal points as well as points intermediate.
...In both agricultural and maritime settings, the names of the winds were at once practical and phenomenologically basic: to step outside and to feel them was to know how things were in the most basic sense, to “know which way the wind is blowing”, as we still vestigially say, and to find the language to speak of it.
...If I were ever permitted to teach a course on the philosophy of wind, I would begin with the questions: How did the winds lose their names? And what does it mean for us to live in a world of nameless winds? I step outside and I feel a gust. “That’s wind,” I think to myself, and I have nothing more to add beyond that. I don’t know the winds.
The Genius of Apple's Name
An Article by Shawn WangIt's easy to have strong opinions about stuff only developers see since user validation is just asking people like yourself. It's much harder to name something consumer facing. Here are some useful rules I gleaned from Apple:
- Two syllables max
- Familiar English word - literal 5 year olds can spell and pronounce it right
- Starts with A - useful for alphabetical sort. Amazon did this too
- Name leads to easy logo/swag/branding ideas
- Evoke aspirational qualities - knowledge, health, nature
Picking better names for variables, functions, and projects
An Article by Tom MacWright- Avoid weasel words
- Follow patterns religiously
- Don’t cheap out on characters
- Call things the same thing
- Don’t name internal projects
- When things change, change their names
The Lorax
Deep in the Grickle-grass
And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say,
if you look deep enough you can still see, today,
where the Lorax once stood
just as long as it could
before somebody lifted the Lorax away.I speak for the trees!
This thing is a Thneed
"Look, Lorax," I said. "There's no cause for alarm.
I chopped just one tree. I am doing no harm.
I'm being quite useful. This thing is a Thneed.
A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It’s a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.
But it has other uses. Yes, far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets!
Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats!"The Lorax said, "Sir! You are crazy with greed.
There is no one on earth who would buy that fool Thneed!"Biggering
I meant no harm. I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger. So bigger I got.
I biggered my factory. I biggered my roads.
I biggered my wagons. I biggered the loads
of the Thneed’s I shipped out. I was shipping them forth
to the South! To the East! To the West! To the North!
I went right on biggering...selling more Thneed’s.
And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.The last of them all
And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack!
From outside in the fields came a sickening smack
of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall.
The very last Truffula Tree of them all.UNLESS
The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance.
Just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance,
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he hoisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.
And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...
UNLESS.The word of the Lorax
But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.