Too many syllables

Too many syllables

Posted Mar 6, 2008 21:09 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: Red Hat's war on RHEL

Red Hat brought this on themselves - seven syllables (eight if you add in a version, and ten if it's a dot release) is too much for casual conversation. Whereas, from a branding and marketing perspective, terms like "Feisty Fawn" or "Gutsy Gibbon" seem to roll off the tongue more effortlessly. :-)

We live in a world whose vernacular (no matter your native tongue) is filled with acronyms. And this isn't just computer science, either. NASA, the U.S. military, and the entire instant-messaging community have vocabularies so incredibly rife with acronyms that it's just a way of life. (Albeit, the IM vocabulary is more of a written-only language.) My CS-themed analogy is that pervasive acronym usage is a form of data compression, a way of increasing data bandwidth in spoken and written language, while preserving semantics.

I don't see why Red Hat is up in arms over this; usually when one mentions "RHEL" in the context of computer OS software, there's really no ambiguity (unless you need to specify the version).

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