calling things 'new'
2023 Nov 26
Back in 1379 someone decided to call their ’new’ college in Oxford ‘New College’.
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
‘New York’ was named in 1664! Before that it was called ‘New Amsterdam’.
Then there is New Zealand named such in the mid 1600s. To my mind the Maori name Aotearoa is so much cooler.
The wondrous fork of vim has been dubbed ’neovim’. It’s a cool name but ’neo’ & ’new’ suffers the same short-sightedness as ‘New College’. Perhaps ’luavim’ would’ve been more accurate, more fitting and longer lasting.
I’ve seen servers set up and called ’new_server’.
Isn’t it like naming a child ‘Junior’? 80 years later it doesn’t look like such a great idea.
Naming things can be hard. You’ve probably been in discussions about what to call a band, magazine, business, child, dog or nearly anything. There are so many angles to consider it seems like a simple shortcut to call it ’new’ something.
Depending on how important a thing is likely to be, it would be good to spend a fitting amount of time and consideration to come up with a better name. It looks bad in the long run when the context of a thing has been ignored doesn’t it!? It can look like laziness (New College), colonialism (New Zealand) or short sightedness (neovim).
This blog post is called ’new’!