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The company is called Jingling which seems to be a Chinese city, so I highly doubt they named it after some obscure English expression.
by hnarn 6y ago
The company is called Jingling which seems to be a Chinese city, so I highly doubt they named it after some obscure English expression.
- adam-a 6y agoWhile I agree it's probably not intentional the word is pretty common in British English.
- hnarn 6y agoObviously "pretty common" is, just like "obscure", completely subjective. I consider it obscure, but all I can say from looking it up is that at least according to Google Ngram, it's about 1/10 as common as "patriotism", which is saying something as that's been a declining word for a century. It's less common than "chauvinism", "sectarianism" and "xenophobia". In fact, tripling the popularity of "jingoism" still wouldn't make it as popular as any of those. It also peaked in the early 1900s and has since been on a low plateu, which again, I consider a marker of obscurity.
- Grustaf 6y agoYou can’t open an issue of The Economist without seeing Trump or some dictator being accused of jingoism.
- GordonS 6y agoAnd how common is it to be a reader of The Economist?
- usr1106 6y agoI have used English as my daily working language in software development for over 20 years and had never heard it before. Well, we don't discuss a lot of politics in international teams, that's a taboo topic especially when working with Chinese colleagues. And for Trump we have only one word, that I don't want to repeat here.
- Grustaf 6y agoThe English needed to discuss software is pretty limited.
- Grustaf 6y agoExtremely common, it’s the standard magazine for economics and politics.
- GordonS 6y agoMaybe, but it's not "extremely common" to read any high-brow publications on politics and economics.
- chris_wot 6y agoWell, it’s used frequently in counties that used to be part of the British Empire it appears. Australians use it all the time.
- GordonS 6y agoI'm a Brit, pushing 40. I'm educated to degree level (1st class, FWIW), and very well read (including the venerable Pratchett, though I don't think I have read Jingo yet). I think I heard the word "jingoism" for the first time ever around 5 years ago. It is not a word one hears very often, and it certainly didn't come to mind from "JingOS". If you often read high-brow political publications you may come across "jingoism" on the daily, but that is obviously not a huge cross-section of the public. TBH, kind of bizarre how strongly this jingoism thing is being pushed in this thread.
- afavour 6y agoTo me the fact that Ngram shows the word “patriotism” on the decline throws doubt on using it for any measure like this. Within the US “patriotism” is used very commonly. It leads me to wonder whether Ngram leans too heavily on scientific or academic literature and not on the words that people actually use in everyday conversation. Does Ngram scan social media, TV or (to a lesser extent) newspapers? If not I’m dubious about the utility here.
- yorwba 6y agoUnless there's a Google Ngram distinct from the Google Books Ngram Viewer https://books.google.com/ngrams/ https://books.google.com/ngrams/ , their statistics are entirely based on material available in Google Books, which might include some newspapers, but probably not social media or TV.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- antihero 6y agoI think it could very much find its place repurposed within a capitalist context to describe the behaviour of big tech companies.
- hrktb 6y agoI did know what jingoism is, but only barely, and mostly from history lessons and didn't think about it at all looking at the OS name. I agree that is still used, but arguably in very specialized contexts, and has many better and less idiomatic alternatives that make it a poor choice in many publication, helping it become rarer. I expect a lot of concept names not directly bound to the concept itself to slowly disappear, the same way calling dinnerware "china" won't stand for a lot more generations I think.
- Grustaf 6y agoNot very obscure, but sure.
- hnarn 6y agoWhy isn’t it obscure? Because you know it?
- noir_lord 6y agoI mean Terry Pratchett (very popular English language author) wrote a book literally called Jingo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingo_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingo_(novel) It's not a word you'd hear every day but it's a word I'd bet on the majority of genuinely literate people to understand.
- hnarn 6y agoThe HN filter bubble truly can be a staggering thing sometimes. I never knew I wasn't genuinely literate, but you learn something every day.
- emteycz 6y agoThey said that the majority of genuinely literate people will know it, that doesn't say anything about you.
- hnarn 6y agoIt's still staggeringly elitist and unaware to assume that "genuinely" literate people (whatever that means) should not only know of Pratchett but also know his entire bibliography by heart. While it may come to a shock for English speakers from the UK and the US, not everyone that speaks English are American or British, and may not be primarily interested in literature from those countries.
- emteycz 6y ago
- lvturner 6y agoThey are also based in BeiJING(北京)where Jing (京) can be taken to mean capital.
- nanis 6y ago> I highly doubt they named it after some obscure English expression. It's not that obscure if a nonnative speaker's first reaction is to think "why would anyone want to call a distro by that name"? It doesn't matter that there is a perfectly reasonable alternative motivation for it ... It's just, you'll never find me wanting to be heard saying "I think you should use jingos!"[1] Interestingly, it turns out, someone else thought it would be a good brand name too.[2] So you are not alone. [1]: https://www.bennetyee.org/http_webster.cgi?isindex=jingo&method=exact https://www.bennetyee.org/http_webster.cgi?isindex=jingo&met... [2]: https://buyjingos.com/ https://buyjingos.com/
- footrot 6y agoIt's odd though how names just stick. IPad is the ugliest of names and so are most of the other IPrefixed names. I get some of these choices were to break from dictionary words, but I find them vile! In my mind I placate by saying info-pad. My initial allergy does fade over time. That's advertising/normalisation for you. Patio Cola.
- blaesus 6y agoThe company has an account on Bilibili[0], where its Chinese name is specified as 鲸鲮. 鲸, romanised as Jing, means "whales" (the animal). So JingOS would be "WhaleOS". (鲮, romanised as Ling, is another water animal known as "mud carp".) [https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Za4y1n7pY https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Za4y1n7pY]