Names are a kind of psychic hack.
You give something a name, and it becomes a thing.
People start living in its world. They start bowing to it.
The content of the name affects their relationship to the thing. They get tripped up by the other names it’s similar to.
Names stick. And named things stick. People tend to accept the first named thing of a kind.
In work, if you name something too early, nothing you say will undo the (mis)understandings it leads your peers to.
Qualities of a good name
- Describes the thing it refers to
- Sufficiently general – makes only necessary assumptions
- Sufficiently specific – describes the essential content of the thing, which makes it what it is
- Evergreen – avoid components that alude to time/order… time has a tendancy of passing, and new things have a tendancy of arriving