Recently in the Names Category

TIME magazine provides a list of 11 Great Secret Service Code Names. I don't love their discussions and presentation of the names, but I like the names themselves, from Paul Ryan's “Bowhunter” to Barack Obama's “Renegade” to Cindy McCain's “Parasol.” And yes, the gender differences are especially interesting.

2600.com has a better and longer list without the annoying annotations, though also presumably without the fact-checking. That list has a fair bit of overlap with a list from the NNDB, though I don't know whether either of those two lists used the other as a source. Some of the ones I like from those lists:

Driller

Todd Palin

Dynamo

Amy Carter

Evergreen

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Kittyhawk

Queen Elizabeth II

Napoleon

Frank Sinatra

Rhyme

Maureen Reagan

Scorecard

Dan Quayle

Snowstorm

George H. W. Bush

Stardust

John Anderson

Tempo

Laura Bush

Unicorn

Prince Charles

For more code names, and more info, see Wikipedia.

Still clearing out old comment spam, but close to done.

Most of the time, spambots either enter non-name phrases into the Name box or use pretty ordinary names. But I just noticed a cluster of intriguing ones:

• Conway Hound in the Plain
• Chalmers House of Lords
• Culbert Cool and Brilliant
• Bartholomew Warlike

I Googled a couple of the phrases, and found that they're the meanings of the names, from baby-name kinds of sites.

Which is pretty prosaic after all; the spambots are just taking a first name and tacking on the name's meaning. But I do like the phrase “Culbert Cool and Brilliant”; maybe it's part of the same series as Sarah, Plain and Tall.

(Okay, it turns out that there really is a series, and the other books don't have titles like that. But it's still a good joke, so I'll leave it.)

Sometime around the beginning of March, I came across the word theophory, which Wikipedia says is "the practice of embedding the name of a god or a deity in, usually, a proper name."

For example, Wikipedia says that the name "Elijah" incorporates both "El" and "Jah," both of which refer to God; it says the name translates to (among other things) "My God is Jah."

All of which is interesting enough to me on its own—I had known that "El" in names sometimes referred to God, but had no idea there was a word for that—but is even more interesting to me because my very own name is an example of theophory.

My parents had various reasons for naming me "Jedediah": partly after Jedediah Smith, for example, and partly because it was, they always said, King Solomon's name before he changed it to Solomon.

Turns out in that context it's usually spelled "Jedidiah," with an i in place of the second e. But regardless, it was in fact a name given to Solomon when he was a baby, and it means "beloved of God"; I never thought of this before, but I now assume the "iah" part at the end refers to Yahweh.

An assortment of real-life British punny names, with more in the comments following the article. Including a couple that are so British I didn't get them. It took me a while to figure out that Dawn Hobbs probably sounds like "doorknobs" in some British accents, for example.

Apparently, Utah Mormon names are often pretty unusual. A couple who used to live in Utah have been collecting such names for the past ten years or so; the result is a fascinating name collection, the Utah Baby Namer.

Recently came across an interesting item in Wikipedia: List of names for the Biblical nameless, which "compiles names given in Jewish or Christian mythology for characters who are unnamed in the Bible itself."

For example, the apocryphal book of Jubilees gives Noah's wife's name as Emzara.

I'm pretty sure that I already knew that the Western Gorilla has the taxonomic name Gorilla gorilla (genus + species).

But I don't think I knew until now that the Western Lowland Gorilla has the taxonomic name Gorilla gorilla gorilla (genus + species + subspecies). (Also known as G. g. gorilla.)

I'm sure that to scientists, this is a perfectly ordinary name. But I'm tickled by it.

And it makes me think that Buffalo buffalo buffalo ought to be the taxonomic name for the Midwestern Lowland Buffalo.

(See also Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo in Wikipedia.)

And perhaps Badger badger badger ought to be some kind of taxonomic name as well.

Note that in Badger, MN, they allow badgers to create and provide badges, so those are Badger badger badgers; I hear that Badger badger badgers Badger badger badgers badger badger Badger badger badgers.

Now I want to start putting together sentences like "Buffalo buffalo Gorilla gorilla gorilla buffalo buffalo Gorilla gorilla gorilla."

Or maybe "Gorilla gorilla gorilla Buffalo buffalo buffalo badger Badger badger badgers."

(I'm assuming that Gorilla gorilla gorilla can be used as a plural, which may be grammatically dubious but makes for funnier sentences.)

There's a drug called rapamycin, which is showing promising results in anti-aging studies.

But that's not why I'm mentioning it here. I'm mentioning it because of this sentence from the abovelinked article:

A review committee decided to test this agent because rapamycin blocks a protein called "target of rapamycin," or TOR.

For all I know, that's a completely standard way to name proteins, but I'm nonetheless tickled. It's like naming a plant "FOD," for "food of deer." Or changing the term "President" to "GOP," for "goal of politicians."

Makers of computer software and hardware have to give each new version of a given product a new label or name, to distinguish it from other versions.

There are a variety of different approaches to version naming; a given company rarely continues a given naming scheme for more than about three or four versions. I think marketing people get antsy if you don't change the naming scheme every few years to make the product seem even newer and fancier than before.

For example, just look at Windows version numbers. A very rough outline: 1, 2, 3, NT, 95, 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista, 7.

Or, less extreme, Dreamweaver version numbers: (roughly) 1, 2, 3, 4, MX, MX 2004, 8, CS3, CS4.

Mac OS stuck with consecutively numbered versions for a long time, but then came "System 7" (still numbered, but not quite as simple), and then Mac OS 8, 9, and "X." (The official pronunciation is "Mac Oh Ess Ten.") That OS hasn't yet gone through a period of being named by year.

After the named-by-year period there's generally a period of names that have nothing to do with version numbers--which is arguably what Apple's already done with the big-cats theme, but they still use version numbers as part of the name. And they've also missed the usual period of being named by a cryptic but cool-sounding two letters that suggest something but don't technically stand for anything (NT, XP, MX, SE, LC, cx, ci, etc), though the "X" in "Mac OS X" serves somewhat the same purpose.

Interestingly, Apple's gone through almost all those phases with hardware names; I wonder if that's part of why they've mostly avoided those phases with OS names.

I wrote most of the above on a mailing list about a year ago, during a discussion of future code names for OS X, before the name "Snow Leopard" had been revealed. Various suggestions from various sources included Cougar, Ocelot, Lynx, Bobcat, Lion, Mountain Lion, and Liger. (Also Cheetah and Puma, but those were internal code names for versions 10.0 and 10.1.)

I jokingly suggested Serval because they're super-cute, but that and Ocelot and Liger seemed to me too obscure.

And Cougar, Bobcat, and Mountain Lion all seem like a step down from big fancy cats like Leopard.

I can't resist noting one more suggestion: someone in the Unofficial Apple Weblog poll suggested Lolcat as the next OS X version name.

Anyway, speaking of animals and version names, none of that is what I meant to write today. The main point of this entry was meant to be this item from today's swine flu news update:

The World Health Organization says it will stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs. It will instead refer to the virus by its scientific name, "H1N1 influenza A."

I understand the goal here--apparently lots of people are avoiding eating pork to avoid getting swine flu, and I'm sure the world's pork producers are unhappy about it. But I don't think the WHO is thinking clearly about that particular aspect of the problem. I'm pretty sure that few news organizations or people on the street will refer to this as "H1N1 influenza A," not when they've got a perfectly good, catchy, short, and seemingly easily understandable alternative in "swine flu."

So I propose that the WHO take a page from the computer industry or the hurricane namers, and start giving version numbers/names to major disease outbreaks.

For example, the current flu could be designated "Influenza 2009 A." Or "Flu Pandemic 2.0" (1.0, of course, having been the Spanish flu, a.k.a. "Influenza 1918 A.") Or "WorldFlu XS." Or it could have a catchy code name, like "Flu Wildfire"--part of a natural disasters theme (so the next one might be "Flu Hurricane" or "Flu Earthquake").

Just saw this headine:

Supreme Court Rules that Government Can Fine for 'Fleeting Expletives'

--Washington Post, April 28, 2009

Wouldn't "The Fleeting Expletives" be a good band name?