If you pivot to early, or lose your vision otherwise, that’s not a fault of the model, but rather a poor decision on the part of the entrepreneur. Really, it’s a question of measuring and responding to the right things.

That was one moment we all realized that though English enabled us to jot down elegantly many of our thoughts, it still was incapable for at least some.

Many short sentences. Sound profound.

Luckily, not appearing to try to sound so.

I remember reading somewhere that a concept is nothing but the abstraction of meaning from reality. In other words, we name something using a word(s) to make it a concept.

Too often I find people copping out of logical discussions by quoting some variation of “what’s in a name…” but that itself is a logical stand that needs words to be put forth (except in some koans that end in a slap).

In the Chandogya Upanishad, when Sage Narada seeks advice from Sanat Kumar for peace of mind, he is asked what all he already knows and he lists 64 arts and branches of knowledge. He is told, “All these are just names… words… hence you are restless!”

Naming kids in India is a amazingly complex subject. Many have a formal/official name and a shorter/modern name used by family and close friends. This is sometimes known as “house name” but “house name” has a different meaning especially among Andhraites and Keralites. Until about the 1970s it was common to have South Indian names written as BA where A is the person’s name and B is the father’s name. This got subsequently standardized as AB (ABC where surname C exists). My formal name got changed to my “house name” through official gazette to avoid having duplicate names (Both my father’s name and my name would have been AB).

It feels strangely illuminating when you come to know that the stiffly formal, highly revered, senior bureaucrat is called “ambichoo” or “baby” (common male and female nick names respectively among Tamilians). For some reason, Punjabis and Sindhis prefer nick names like “Lucky” and “Bunty”.

Around 1985 somebody published an encyclopedia of Maharashtrian surnames that catalogued interesting name origins. For example, someone in Emperor Shivaji’s court who frequently complained of stomach (“pote” in Marathi) ache (“dukhne”) and was teased as “Potdukhe”, adopted it as the family name for generations to come!

Wikipedia:
“One vital aspect of [Earthsea] magic is that it is impossible for humans to lie in the old language, so that magic works by forcing the universe to conform to the words spoken by the magician. For example, to say “I am an eagle” in the old language means that the speaker becomes an eagle, so that the statement is no longer false. Only the powerful are able to say such lines in the Old Speech and force these transformations.”

I guess that’s one of the reasons Earthsea appeals to programmer-nerds.

Also:
http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html

I thought this was an interesting concept.

Not many languages can efficiently express questions of ordinality. In English for instance, the question, what is your birth-order ordinality among your siblings? sounds downright weird, but I cannot find a simpler, grammatical way to express it.

It is much easier to ask the related cardinality question: how many siblings do you have? 

Curiously, the ordinal question is very easy to ask in my nominal native language of Kannada. It would translate to something like: How many-eth son are you of your father? If such constructs were allowed in English. At least that was the best I could come up with my father challenged me to translate the line as a kid.

Latin has quotus (though it doesn’t seem to have been preserved in Romance languages, AFAIK).

“How many of your siblings are older than you?”

You might use “brothers and sisters” instead of “siblings”. And some people might choose to ignore one gender. And …

(* I guess URI shorteners more or less do the same thing, and just clip off the null bits.)

The idea was to mint names you didn’t care about, so you could throw them away when a better one came along (or let the content of the referent define it).

Didn’t mean to draw an analogy between the two types of marketing. The processes and industry structures for tar-sand or shale-oil mining are not the same as the ones for regular oil drilling.

I do think though that the new marketing will have as much or more power as the old. Just because other forces (including the individuals and subcultures themselves) may be gaining more power does not mean that other forces are not gaining relatively EVEN more power. It’s like incomes and income inequality increasing at the same time, across the board. Except with ‘liberty.’ There’s more actual liberty being created, but the growth-share of marketing forces is likely to be more than that of other forces in the medium term.

But it’s a problem I’ll probably have to take on more squarely, by the time this site experiences its next doubling in traffic/subscribers (which should be in about 18-24 months if things keep up).