“And the words, Frederick?”
—Leo Lionni (“Frederick and His Friends”)
“One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong. And so it makes everything a little bit harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently.”
—Richard Feynman (Computer Heuristics Lecture, 4:57-5:10)
“O, be some other name!”
—The Bard ("Romeo and Juliet", Act II, Scene II, Line 42)
“Y U NO USE YOUR WORDS”
—https://memegenerator.net/instance/64437576
An article on Wikipedia about The pen is mightier than the sword says that the phrase is a metonymic adage.
Metonymic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), means “of, involving, or used in metonymy.” The first OED definition of metonymy is “the substitution of a word denoting an attribute or adjunct of a thing for the word denoting the thing itself; an instance of this.” This definition of metonymy wasn't very easy for me to understand at first. Thankfully, the OED provides this example:
‘Stokes’, the name of the inventor . . has, by metonymy, come to mean the trench mortar gun itself.Aha! Once the example registered, it was as though scales fell from my eyes and the meaning of metonymy became apparent to me. Note that Wikipedia has a description of Wilfred Stokes; the site also has as a description of Stokes mortar, which sounds dreadful and has come to be associated with the name ‘Stokes’. These Wikipedia articles are corroborating evidence that the name ‘Stokes’ is an exemplar of a metonymy: it is an instance of the substitution of a word denoting an attribute or adjunct of a thing for the word denoting the thing itself.
Jesus of Nazareth, according to Gilbert Highet, is the most famous teacher of the Western world (Highet, 168) and was a prolific composer of metonymic adages. On page 173 of The Art of Teaching, Highet writes about the way Jesus performed them:
This reconstruction of the manner in which Jesus spoke is supported by the work of recent scholars such as Professor Torrey of Yale and Professor Burney of Oxford, both of whom emphasize the fact that he used the Aramaic language. Professor Burney retranslated his most famous sayings into Aramaic and found that they often fell into rhythmical patterns ... Some of these sayings, he suggested, not only scanned rhythmically but had an echoing rhyme. If this is true, then Jesus composed his saying in the form which would make them most memorable.William Shakespeare, another famous teacher, certainly used rythm and rhyme to create memorable metonymic adages. In Act II Scene II of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare coins the metonymic phrase a rose by any other name:
Shakespeare drives home the point that, as unfair as it might seem, the names we are given—the words we are called—identify us; they shine a light on the ones who gave birth to us or named us; they are clues about who we are or where we come from. From cradle to grave, each of us is a unique individual; we're not merely the DNA gifted to us by our parents. We can choose not to use our given names, we can adopt others, but we can never escape the truth of who we are or where we come from. Our names remind us of our history, our potential, and our limitations. As Reinhold Niebuhr puts it in the Serenity Prayer:
- Jul.'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
- Thou art thyself . . .
- . . . O, be some other name!
- What's in a name? that which we call a rose
- By any other name would smell as sweet;
- So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
- Retain that dear perfection which he owes
- Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,Donald Knuth, one of the greatest computer science teachers, composed the following two opening lines for his preface to Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming:
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music. This book is the first volume of a seven-volume set of books that has been designed to train the reader in the various skills which go into a programmer's craft.Words are powerful tools. They can be beautiful, especially when ordered, one after another, in long, creative combinations. They take work and require practice to use well, but they can also be fun and thrilling to search for and discover. Computer programmers use lots of words. The more words a programmer has in her quiver and the more practice and skill she has using them, the easier it is for her to hit her mark. Programmers use words to tell computers what to do. But they also use words to inform and persuade people. Do not underestimate the significance or power of words!
Hear the New Jerusalem Bible's translation of verses 19 and 20 of chapter 2 of the book of Genesis:
Like Adam, coders are responsible for choosing names for classes of things like Cattle, subclasses like FictionalCattle, sub-subclasses like LiteraryCattle, and instances of classes like purpleCow. (Also like Adam, coders benefit from having an Eve—someone to accompany, encourage, and help produce amazing results that would have been impossible to produce alone. A popular example of this style of coding is called Pair Programming.)
- So from the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild animals and the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he would call them; each one was to bear the name the man would give it.
- The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild animals. But no helper suitable for the man was found for him.
Consider the following two lines of code:
for (Verse v=9; v <= 10; v++)What entity names can you spy with your little eye in this piece of code? What do the names of these entities suggest about what they might be or how they might behave? Can you guess what will happen when the code runs? What does the code say to you about the person who wrote it?
myFavoriteVerses.push(Bible.NewJerusalemTranslation.Ecclesiastes[9, v]);
When practicing the art of computer programming, the names you choose and the words you use should help people understand what you're trying to do. But also strive to make them say something about who you are. Choose them wisely, because they might be around around for a very long time.
Happy composing!
