Four and twenty name ideas

Christian Crumlish

There's a whole new slew of name suggestions for the project to be formerly known as pie. I was surprised to see one I had suggested in an off-hand way on the #echo channel at freenode (Nota), when during the previous vote, I saw Nick Chalko fretting about what would happen if NOTA won the vote.

Nota? I thought. I don't remember that suggestion, plus anyway why is he so concerned. Does he just not like the name?

Finally I realized that there was a "none of the above" option in the election (there should be one in every election, plus instant runoff, but let's not go there right now). He was just worried about bikeshed issue continuing to go unresolved.

But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the name Nota. I remembered from my smattering of Latin the phrase nota bene meaning literally "note well" or "take note of this," still often to this day abbreviated as "n.b.:"

Plus, what are these blog entries if not notes? Notes to self, notes on my slow demise, notes on n uprising. You name it. Nota is a nice Esperanto-ey version of note, after all. Ironically, I had suggested "note" itself a few cycles back. I liked the idea of a musical whole note as the 'o' in ""note" and the sound-propagation metaphors from echo, and the basic note-taking meaning. But nota is better.

Anyway, the arguments are made ably by Chad Everett. As far as I know, he arrived at this exact same name more or less through the same confluence of ideas. Only the chatroom log knows for sure.

Lately I've not been signing contributions to the wiki (aside from votes or my recent nomination of yet another name idea for, Blackbird, for the four and 20 blackbirds / hobbyhorses / banjoes / baked into Pie), and irc chat feels more ephemeral. Off-hand remarks are thrown there onto the wind and not logged by me, so I felt these strange irrtationl pangs of idea-ownership when I stumbled on the wiki page, mixed with a warm feeling of fellowship.