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Ask HN: Are “normal” vocabulary getting depleted by tech-brand hijacking?
I feel like I could barely read titles or even normal sentences these days without halting to double- or triple check whether any of the seemingly innocuous vocabulary are in fact references to tech products.
Are we on track to lose the ability to make simple sentences without constantly checking to make sure that we're not ambiguous about whether we're using the word in its dictionary sense or if we're inadvertently referring to some obscure tech startup?
This wouldn't be such a big problem if the usages of these are spares and properly capitalized/stylized, however what used to be assurances for these are now also being encroached upon as well -- the former being the seeming frequency at which "catchy" tech product names are adopted and gaining popularity, and the latter being that some goes further than dictating their stylization and insists on dictating the "correct" grammatical syntax when referring to them in context.
- quantified 4y agoI don't think it has much to do with tech brands. It's just vastly easier to squat on many names because it's vastly easier to start businesses that are based purely on info technology. (I use "information business" to mean a company that is built on/around software and networking tech but does not produce new tech itself. Facebook and Uber are tech companies, they've produced new tech like database engines, workflow engines, and so on. Lots of companies write Python and use databases to do stuff, but create only applications.) You don't need things like an office, store or factory. And you're in a global namespace, so all of a sudden you can't have Peter's Bike Shop in 100 different cities all be independent names.
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoI am unclear what you are asking. Are you stating that titles are incomprehensible? Are titles replete with "tech-brand" jargon? Or, that you fail to comprehend the contents of the titles because attention drift?
- version_five 4y agoI think he's saying that startups now have one word noun names, like "lever" or something (that's also a soap mind) and so some sentences might ambiguously use a company's name. The hint I'd look for is the absence of the word "the" preceding the word.
- dudul 4y agoWould have been nice to provide examples.
- lioeters 4y agoA few off the top of my head: Go - https://go.dev/ https://go.dev/ Python - https://www.python.org/ https://www.python.org/ Rust - https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ React - https://reactjs.org/ https://reactjs.org/ Framework - https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/ Hegel - https://hegel.js.org/ https://hegel.js.org/
- wizofaus 4y agoWhat on earth does hegel mean? (not in any dictionary I can find as anything other than a proper noun). But other more obvious "Tech-brand" hijacks would surely include most browser names (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera...), and of course Zoom, Teams, Twitter, Tinder & Telegram then the "indistinguishable in speech" ones like Tumblr, Flickr, Grindr, arguably even TikTok (*) etc. Arguably in most cases it's obvious when written due to the capitalisation anyway. * interesting that Chrome's spell checker doesn't like TikTok regardless of how you capitalise it, unlike all other examples
- xeonmc 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33188484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33188484
- steveklabnik 4y agoOne of the oldest entries in the hacker cannon is the “jargon file.” This isn’t particularly new. It’s always been this way.