project naming

Any "cognitive pathway" that exists for people speaking one language will not work for the majority of people, who speak some other language.

If you dislike the name Choqok, then you can see the futility in trying to provide a cognitive pathway. (‘Choqok’ provides as good a cognitive pathway for a Twitter client as any, to people who know it as a word meaning “sparrow”.)

It's hard to be sure that a given proposed project name doesn't exist as slang with negative connotations somewhere or other: for example, the relatively large English dictionary on my shelf doesn't mention the US slang sense of the word ‘gimp’ that the speaker was referring to (which I gather means something like ‘limp’), and most of the meanings it does give are somewhat decorative (and positive) in nature, so appropriate to a graphics program. Trying to choose a name that provides a good cognitive pathway in one language seems more likely to fall afoul of this problem than choosing a name like Kazehakase.

Perhaps the lesson to take from the HeliOS experience, then, is not so much about project naming as having interfaces give more prominence to descriptions and icons and less prominence to project names.