*I don't wanna get all mystical-neologistic here, but this weblog post has a very "dark euphoria" feeling.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/02/02/how-to-name-things/
(...)
"1.0, 2.0, 3.0, NT, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.
"This is no accident. Microsoft, has always been a company that has sought its way in the existing world, rather than inviting the world into a fabricated universe of non sequiturs like Apple, Macintosh and Lisa.
"The original portmanteau, MICRO-computer SOFT-ware, was a seeking of a place in a world defined by others. The micro-computer was ordinally a lesser thing than the mini-computer. Soft-ware was one of three wares: hard, soft and firm. An element in a set of cardinality three. It was a shy, retiring and polite name, that knew its place in the scheme of things.
"But the personality worked, and Microsoft quietly took over the universe it entered so politely. Windows was a literal-minded appropriation of the name of a key element of the desktop metaphor. Office seeks to belong in the workplace rather than redefine it. Internet Explorer remains the only browser that presumes to name itself after the thing it explores.
"How a company names itself, its products and services, and its organizational parts, tells you a great deal about it.
"To number something — implicitly or explicitly, cardinally or ordinally — is the first step in a grander project to order, tag and classify a part of reality; to prepare it for timeless forms of manipulation: replacement and interchange. To number is to subsume the particular within the general.
"But to really name something in the sense of Le Guin, is to disrupt that project at every turn by discovering new magic that confounds the creeping logic of a rigidly ontological enterprise...."
