Life is a series of blunders. Each one is a chance to learn. I blundered big, publicly and with full orchestration recently. I learned a lot about many things, including that it is astonishingly difficult to find an English word without sexual or negative connotation. But let’s start at the beginning.

For more than 2 years, we have worked on (what is now called) _magpie, a piece of software that facilitates the creation and dissemination of (behavioral) psychological experiments. “_magpie” is an acronym:

magpie_logo

Before _magpie was called “_magpie”, it was called “_babe”, which was also an acronym:

babe_logo

The choice of “_babe” was, let’s say, a tad naive. I chose it (the rest of the team is blameless!) because I liked the sound of it, and I associated it with caring affection, closeness, intimacy. (I also associated it with a cute little piglet movie star.) I knew that the word “babe” also serves to refer to people with subjectively high physical attractiveness, but I thought that this use is not very prominent and that if I call the (abstract) product of our labor “_babe”, it should be clear enough that I do not intend to refer to anything sexual. But language doesn’t simply mean what I want it to mean. That’s a Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning, and it applies equally in the social/subjective-connotational domain.

After introducing “_babe” to the world out there on Twitter, a friendly colleague pointed out that some people in their lab felt that the name was inappropriate. The reactions were reported as:

“I expect science and my career to be one place in the world where I won’t constantly be judged for how I look or find references to how people look.”

Or as:

“Male researchers in particular using this as an acronym for what’s literally a set of objects is not totally appropriate.”

So, that’s it! As clear reason not to use a name it suffices that it has an obvious sexual or negative connotation that bystanders would notice, and that they would need to invest extra effort and charity to conclude that the term was meant to be used in a non-sexual / non-offensive way. To the extent that it is easy for the negative connotation to arise, and to the extent that it is easy to avoid the negative connotation by a different name, the choice is bad. “_babe” was a bad choice for that reason, and we have therefore renamed it.

Coming up with a new name was quite painful, though! I’m not complaining. File it as compensation for my Humpty-Dumpty-ness, and: it was a second major learning experience. On the way of finding a new name, I learned how seemingly almost any sound sequence that could be or is an English word has either a sexual or negative connotation. My new worst friend over the last weeks has been the Urban Dictionary. Here are the top five lowlights of candidates I temporarily considered (sticking to an acronym was for sports, obviously), before learning about iffy connotations or other secondary uses:

  1. “herb” (helpers for experimental resesarch in the browser): can mean “nerd” or “idiot”, especially after a disastrous advertizing campaign of a large fast food chain in the 80s.
  2. “hep” (helpers for making experiments portable): should be the predecessor of “hip” for something cool and fashionable, but there are also the “hep-hep”-riots.
  3. “saber” (simple architecture for browser expeRiments): can mean “pretty lady” or “a man whore or a man who sleeps around excessively with either man or woman” according to the Urban Dictionary.
  4. “sape” (service architecture for portable experiments): a term used to express negative feelings towards a person in virtue of that person being human (from homo sapiens).
  5. “fieb” (framework for interactive experiments in the browser): should remind us of Fiep Westendorp and her beautiful minimal design, but sound like “feeb” which can mean “idiot”.

Sadly but predictably, even the term “magpie” has uses that are negative, e.g., referring to a person who takes over another person’s misery for their own drama, as in: “I’m so offended that you didn’t even tell me earlier that your life is in ruins!” But the hope is that, in this case, the beauty and intelligence of the bird will simply outshine any of the much less salient uses.