the problem with your stupid naming scheme (a short, poorly-written rant)

[waider]

There has been an annoying trend in recent years - or possibly longer than that, and I wasn't cranky enough about it until now - to take an existing word and modify it in meaningless ways to label largely unrelated entities. I am, of course, referring to such delightful neologisms as "blogtastic", "warchalking", and the recently-mentioned-here "podslurping". Now, I'm skimming someone's page, and he's just mentioned gtkpod. And during the week I looked at monopod. One of these is a loader for iPod devices, the other is a "scraper" for "podcasts" (ugh, again) that doesn't require a portable media player of any sort, much less an actual Apple-brand one. But thanks to this wonderful trend, it's impossible to tell which is which without digging them up. It's not like all software should be usefully named (after all, my own media player loading code is labelled "MPLE" thanks to a sequence of characters I found in one of the file headers), but this predilection for inane reuse and permutation of overused words is just, well, stupid.

When I'm feeling less cranky about it, of course, it reminds me of a long-ago post to talk.bizarre.