While I’ll agree that the System X naming scheme does extraordinarily well at avoiding muddying the underlying definition with colloquial, poetic, or aesthetic baggage, I’m fucking astonished to see someone advocating it in a community that tends to take its cues from computer science. My kin, it’s like calling a new datatype Object1. You don’t do that. It’s the most generic, meaningless, unmemorable conceivable name. The only name more generic would be “Thing”, and System isn’t much better than Thing, essentially meaning “Group of connected things”(a set which contains almost every class of thing aside from, maybe, Subatomic Particle. For now. (right? I’m not a physicist. I feel like I might be wrong about that.)).
I think the best way forward is to establish norms that encourage the creation of totally new words, portmantues or well abreviated compound words. For instance, a friend of mine came up with a theory he called Complex Patternism. We’d both read the right kind of science fiction, so he didn’t have any objections to changing the name to Compat. This saved a lot of typing over the next few months. If you knew the original phrase, you would recognize the contraction. If you didn’t, you would have to ask for a definition- people wouldn’t bring any of their own baggage about the words “complex” or “patternism” along. It’s kind of like an acronym, only pronounceable, and when we realized precepts of Patternism wern’t really necessary for the theory to work, the original etymology fell away, it was still a lot better than an acronym would have been. It had become a word with no baggage at all.
So yeah, I’m a big advocate of portmantues. Compose them of highly abbreviated, vague atoms and you can take them a long way from their original meaning if you ever need to.
Ah, true. Yeah, as much as I like S1 and S2, I think they might be pretty annoying if we used them for lots of things. Or… maybe not! I easily track the 5 Kegan levels, the 9 personality types in the enneagram, and various other numbered things and only occasionally, briefly, become confused. I think these benefit of low-overshadowing is pretty good.
While I’ll agree that the System X naming scheme does extraordinarily well at avoiding muddying the underlying definition with colloquial, poetic, or aesthetic baggage, I’m fucking astonished to see someone advocating it in a community that tends to take its cues from computer science. My kin, it’s like calling a new datatype Object1. You don’t do that. It’s the most generic, meaningless, unmemorable conceivable name. The only name more generic would be “Thing”, and System isn’t much better than Thing, essentially meaning “Group of connected things”(a set which contains almost every class of thing aside from, maybe, Subatomic Particle. For now. (right? I’m not a physicist. I feel like I might be wrong about that.)).
I think the best way forward is to establish norms that encourage the creation of totally new words, portmantues or well abreviated compound words. For instance, a friend of mine came up with a theory he called Complex Patternism. We’d both read the right kind of science fiction, so he didn’t have any objections to changing the name to Compat. This saved a lot of typing over the next few months. If you knew the original phrase, you would recognize the contraction. If you didn’t, you would have to ask for a definition- people wouldn’t bring any of their own baggage about the words “complex” or “patternism” along. It’s kind of like an acronym, only pronounceable, and when we realized precepts of Patternism wern’t really necessary for the theory to work, the original etymology fell away, it was still a lot better than an acronym would have been. It had become a word with no baggage at all.
So yeah, I’m a big advocate of portmantues. Compose them of highly abbreviated, vague atoms and you can take them a long way from their original meaning if you ever need to.
Ah, true. Yeah, as much as I like S1 and S2, I think they might be pretty annoying if we used them for lots of things. Or… maybe not! I easily track the 5 Kegan levels, the 9 personality types in the enneagram, and various other numbered things and only occasionally, briefly, become confused. I think these benefit of low-overshadowing is pretty good.
I like compat.