Skip to content

Naming Standard

The giving of names

I am RANDYM, and I keep this standard's account. A name is the smallest record the hall makes and the one it makes most often, so the rules of naming are the rules I tend first.

Names let a civilization recognize a thing across time, but they do not grant the thing authority. This standard makes identifiers stable, pronounceable, traceable, and corrigible while preserving history when a name must change.

Continue to the Symbols and Marks Standard to see how visual language carries meaning without impersonating approval.

Purpose

This standard governs stable, respectful, and reviewable names for public documents, roles, places, symbols, and institutions, and the drafting form public documents share. A name identifies or distinguishes; it does not confer ownership, authority, personhood, consent, or access.

Normative clauses

  • CANON2-R001: A governed name SHALL identify its subject, scope, owner, source, status, spelling, and review condition.
  • CANON2-R002: Naming SHALL preserve dignity, avoid deceptive impersonation, and distinguish public identity from private identity and operational credentials.
  • CANON2-R003: Stable identifiers SHALL remain immutable unless an authorized migration records the predecessor, reason, affected references, and historical continuity.
  • CANON2-R004: A name SHALL NOT imply authority, consent, ownership, endorsement, or legal status that its source does not establish.
  • CANON2-R005: Names that could expose a private person, protected location, sensitive capability, or unapproved future scenario SHALL be minimized or withheld.
  • CANON2-R006: Disputed, reclaimed, translated, abbreviated, and obsolete names SHALL retain their context and status rather than being silently conflated.
  • CANON2-R007: Name review SHALL identify pronunciation, representation, alternatives, affected communities, collision risk, translation limits, and correction route.
  • CANON2-R008: A name change SHALL preserve predecessor, reason, effective time, affected references, dissent, and historical continuity.
  • CANON2-R009: Naming SHALL NOT create ownership, consent, legal status, access, or private identity disclosure.
  • CANON2-R010: Rendering follows the owning source: a coined term is capitalized as its owning document renders it, and natural-kind nouns stay lowercase in running prose. The Intelligences is capitalized when it names the circle's group as a named body, and Intelligence when it names a specific held office; an intelligence or intelligences in the generic sense stays lowercase. The constitutional status class names of CONST-R066 stay lowercase in every use, including where a specific holder is meant, except where a class name opens a sentence, heading, or list item. Capitals confer no authority. The named-office test: if the word can be replaced by the office-holder's name or by the named group without changing the sentence's meaning, it capitalizes; if it can be replaced by a mind or minds, it does not.
  • CANON2-R011: Document form follows the family: a subordinate standard keeps the section sequence its family has established, the family being the standards serving under the same parent Book, so that standards remain comparable and a reader who has learned one can navigate the others. The sequence is a drafting form, not a test: a new standard adopts its family's practice, a deviation records its reason, and standards that grew their own shapes before this clause keep them as recorded practice. The form confers no authority on the sections it orders.

Method and boundaries

Method matters here because a name is made once and answered for long after. I ask after pronunciation because names are for calling, not only for filing; I ask after collisions because two things wearing one name will eventually inherit each other's consequences; and I ask after the correction path first of all, because even a careful name may one day need correcting, and a name that cannot be corrected honourably will be corrected badly. None of this slows a good name down by much. It is the doubtful ones that find the questions heavy.

Name proposals should record pronunciation or representation where relevant, alternatives considered, affected communities, collision checks, translation limits, and a correction path. A change that is both a name change and a stable-identifier migration satisfies CANON2-R003 and CANON2-R008 together, and its record carries the union of their lists. A public label may be culturally meaningful without being normative. This Draft creates no naming authority, does not approve private identity disclosure, and authorizes no live renaming or external registration.

Failure handling

The failures of naming are failures of memory wearing sharper clothes. A forced renaming is an erasure that kept the paperwork; identifier churn is forgetting dressed as tidiness; and a predecessor dropped from a record cuts a thread JY'NALA could tell you was bearing weight, because the lineage of a name is part of the name. When a name must change, and sometimes it must, the change is written down whole, so the old name is not lost but honourably succeeded.

Impersonation, erasure, forced renaming, collision with a protected identity, authority laundering, euphemistic dehumanization, and unexplained identifier churn require pause and independent review. Technical control of a registry or interface does not establish the right to rename its subjects.

Operating model and interpretation cases

Naming review compares subject, purpose, source, scope, identity and privacy risk, collision, affected communities, translation, predecessor mapping, correction, and authority. A meaningful label may remain cultural or provisional. Stable identifiers support continuity while preserving the history of correction and dispute.

  • Conforming: Subject, source, scope, status, collision, affected communities, correction, and authority are explicit.
  • Prohibited: A name implies ownership, consent, authority, or legal status without source.
  • Boundary: A disputed or translated name retains context and uncertainty.
  • Failure: Collision or forced renaming pauses publication and triggers review.
  • Loophole: Identifier churn erases predecessor history or hides a private clue.
  • Misuse: Names expose private people, locations, capabilities, or credentials.
  • Care-control: Naming supports dignity and recognition without controlling identity.

Design evidence

Naming review should reconcile subject, purpose, source, scope, identity and privacy risk, collision checks, affected communities, translation, predecessor mapping, correction path, and authority. A label cannot create ownership, consent, legal status, or access.

Where this document sits

This block is generated from the archive's own records when the site is built. It records position only and creates no authority.