You've gotten good answers, but my take: They're duals. Neither is more or less of a misnomer than the other. It's like one of those sculptures where if you lo

You've gotten good answers, but my take: They're duals. Neither is more or less of a misnomer than the other. It's like one of those sculptures where if you look at it one way, it looks like one thing, but from another angle, it looks like something else. I also think that Rust had no realistic option other than &mut in order to succeed. Rust already has enough weird stuff in it, and while &mut is a little weird, &uniq or similar would be too weird, and the weirdness would be too exposed to new developers too early. I kind of believe that, as this kind of thing gets more popular, and more people become familiar with this conception of the dual nature of mutability and exclusivity, that future languages could experiment with terminology around exclusivity, and that they would not pay the same sort of price that Rust would have had to pay.