As Frank Herbert said in Dune: "A beginning is a delicate time". If you get the name of something wrong at the outset, you're stuck with it. It becomes very hard to change later.
There are a few exceptions. Sam Harris successfully changed the name of his outstanding podcast from "Waking Up" to "Making Sense". (Just as well: the full title…
As Frank Herbert said in Dune: "A beginning is a delicate time". If you get the name of something wrong at the outset, you're stuck with it. It becomes very hard to change later.
There are a few exceptions. Sam Harris successfully changed the name of his outstanding podcast from "Waking Up" to "Making Sense". (Just as well: the full title was the accidentally lubricious-sounding "Waking up with Sam Harris".) It took years and years before Aussies got used to calling Ayer's Rock by its Aboriginal name "Uluru". But at least there was nothing else in English called "Uluru". The same cannot be said of "X".
What's inexcusable about this particular name change is not its poverty of imagination - it's that it's not even a name, it's a variable. "X" conveys no information at all about the product. "X" is what things are called when we don't WANT them to have a name. "The X case" was a famous Irish trial about abortion; in the movie JFK, Jim Garrison encounters a shadowy government agent who identifies himself only as "X"; the "X,Y,Z" scandal was a famous cause célèbre in Jeffersonian America - doubtless even the famous examples multiply to the horizon.
Then again, if Musk wishes to name his new toy SpaceX without the Space, should we really care? Sam Harris himself (a quondam friend of Musk) gave up on Twitter because of its time-wasting and toxicity. If Musk continues to take an accidental wrecking ball to Twitter so that everyone does a Harris and abandons it, won't they all just wind up getting their lives back?
As Frank Herbert said in Dune: "A beginning is a delicate time". If you get the name of something wrong at the outset, you're stuck with it. It becomes very hard to change later.
There are a few exceptions. Sam Harris successfully changed the name of his outstanding podcast from "Waking Up" to "Making Sense". (Just as well: the full title was the accidentally lubricious-sounding "Waking up with Sam Harris".) It took years and years before Aussies got used to calling Ayer's Rock by its Aboriginal name "Uluru". But at least there was nothing else in English called "Uluru". The same cannot be said of "X".
What's inexcusable about this particular name change is not its poverty of imagination - it's that it's not even a name, it's a variable. "X" conveys no information at all about the product. "X" is what things are called when we don't WANT them to have a name. "The X case" was a famous Irish trial about abortion; in the movie JFK, Jim Garrison encounters a shadowy government agent who identifies himself only as "X"; the "X,Y,Z" scandal was a famous cause célèbre in Jeffersonian America - doubtless even the famous examples multiply to the horizon.
Then again, if Musk wishes to name his new toy SpaceX without the Space, should we really care? Sam Harris himself (a quondam friend of Musk) gave up on Twitter because of its time-wasting and toxicity. If Musk continues to take an accidental wrecking ball to Twitter so that everyone does a Harris and abandons it, won't they all just wind up getting their lives back?
Also ironic, given that Sam and his friends are part of what made Twitter toxic.