In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition against their neighbours for visual salience. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
when making new words, i try to follow this principle:
the usefwlness of a label can be measured on multiple fronts:
how easy is it to recall (or regenerate):
the label just fm thinking abt the concept?
low-priority, since you already have the concept.
the concept just fm seeing the label?
mid-priority, since this is easy to practice.[2]
the label fm situations where recalling the concept has utility?
high-priority, since this is the only reason to bother making the label in the first place.
if you’re optimising for b, you might label your concept “distributed boiling-frog attack” (DBFA). someone cud prob generate the whole idea fm those words alone, so it scores on highly on the criterion.
it scores poorly on c, however. if i’m in a situation in which it is helpfwl for me to notice that someone or something is DBFAing me, there are few semiotic/associative paths fm what i notice now to the label itself.
if i reflect on what kinds of situations i want this thought to reappear in, i think of something like “something is consistently going wrong w a complex system and i’m not sure why but it smells like a targeted hostile force”.
maybe i’d call that the “invisible hand of malice” or “inimicus ex machina”.
i rly liked the post btw! thanks!
i happen to call this “symptomatic nymation” in my notes, bc it’s about deriving new word from the effects/symptoms of the referent concept/phenomenon. a good label shud be a solution looking for a problem.
deriving concept fm label is high-priority if you want the concept to gain popularity, however. i usually jst make words for myself and use them in my notes, so i don’t hv to worry abt this.