I read an interesting — but irrelevant — article about IKEA furniture. It’s irrelevant because we don’t have IKEA products in South Africa. So I have never been confused by their product names.
The story goes that the IKEA founder struggled to remember numerical product codes. So he used real Swedish and Nordic words instead, sorted into strict categories. Sofas are named after Swedish places. Bathroom items are named after lakes. Desks and office chairs have men’s names. Fabrics and curtains have women’s names. Children’s items are named after animals, and so on.
It’s a peculiar logic, but logic nonetheless. What about software naming?
Some software names follow a pattern, similar to IKEA. For example, Apple named macOS releases after big cats — Cheetah, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion.
A short guided tour of AI names
I can’t have an article that doesn’t mention AI, so I took a quick look at AI names.
OpenAI doesn’t need any explaining, although future techies might raise eyebrows about the “open” bit. DeepMind is also a well-chosen name.
ChatGPT consists of Chat + GPT. GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. It’s a mouthful, and will soon be forgotten. But there was some thought behind the name.
The meaning behind Gemini is a bit strained. It refers to the idea of duality: the fusion of large-scale reasoning and general-purpose modelling. Hence twins.
Copilot is a good name from a marketing perspective: The AI that helps you navigate difficult terrain. Although I wouldn’t rely on it too much for directions. On a real-life trip, I’d worry it would take me on a route that went through rivers instead of across them.
What about Grok? I thought it would mean something suitably dramatic, to matches its reputation for controversy and scandal. But apparently it is a Martian word. (No, there are no Martians. And if there are, we don’t know what they speak.) Robert A. Heinlein invented a Martian language in his 1961 Sci-fi novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land”. According to Heinlein’s fictitious Martian language, the term grok means “to understand so thoroughly that you merge with the thing understood”. Make of that what you will.
A little naming oops
What works in one culture or language, doesn’t always work as well in another.
The most famous example is Gerber baby food. In the US, the packaging has a picture of a smiling baby on the label. This was used in West African markets, with disastrous results.
At the time, labels in West Africa traditionally showed what was inside the tin. So consumers saw a picture of a baby on a tin and thought … well, they were horrified. It’s now a case study in global marketing courses.
ChatGPT has a little language problem in France. French is a musical, elegant language. But chat“ in French means “cat”, and GPT“ phonetically sounds like “j’ai pété”. Which in French is “passed gas”. (I can’t use the term that usually appears on the internet, for fear of causing offence.) OpenAI probably didn’t plan on smelly cats.
Odd names and odder origins
Many names in IT don’t seem to follow any meaning. Perhaps the idea was to rename them at some future date.
What is the meaning of Git in GitHub? It is not an acronym for anything. Linus Torvalds claimed that he chose the name because “git” is British slang for a stupid or unpleasant person. What kind of logic is that?
Strange names give rise to other strange names. Packet sniffing is the act of intercepting, gathering, and logging data packets. So now there is a network intrusion detection system called Snort. Because your software should remind you of farm animals.
Even serious technical names can result in undesirable abbreviations. GNU is a massive collection of free software designed to work like a Unix operating system.
(Aside: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”. Only tech has recursive acronyms.)
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a free, open-source graphics editor. Unfortunately, the resulting acronym is GIMP. The word “gimp” can refer to a limp, but it is mostly used as an offensive, derogatory term. Users and developers have asked for it to be renamed for years.
What software names make you raise your eyebrows?