Re:Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accele...
by humbledrone on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @11:10PM
(#19621461)
It's worth noting that in some sense, all words are just made up.
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Re:Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accele...
by Udik on Wednesday April 10, 2019 @04:56AM
(#19622957)
Yes, but made up as conventions between people who need a practical way of communicating something. If there is no such need, and the names are not practical for communication, it's more of an in-joke.
Somehow this reminds me of the Borges' tale "Funes the memorious". Being blessed or cursed with a prodigious and absolutely infallible memory, Funes invents his own numeration system which simply assigns to each number a different, arbitrary word from the dictionary. He claims that saying "Napoleon", for example, is way faster than "one thousand two hundred seventy six".