The Basic Idea

OK, here's the idea: we should use hierarchical namespaces to organize words. I even have a couple of examples already, ones that came up while I was writing about other things. In Neology, I wanted to call the first-person-plural assumption (that consciousness is the same for everyone) Dennett.projection, to distinguish it from the more general psychology.projection and the unrelated math.projection and geography.projection; and in Instances and Copies, I wanted to call the standard object concept an OOP.object (or computer.object) as opposed to my own specialized concept, which I guess would be an urticator.object … both distinct from, say, a grammar.object or a world.object.

Of course, the name “urticator.object” immediately suggests the refinement “net.urticator.object”, building the word namespace on top of the domain name namespace, as is done in Java. Or perhaps it would be better to attach (computer.mount) the domain name namespace as a subspace, like so.

word://internet.net.urticator.object
word://person.Wittgenstein.game
word://language.French.fromage

Don't take that last example too seriously—I'm not at all sure that other languages belong in the same namespace. By the way, there's a nice discussion of “cheese” vs. “fromage” in On Words and their Magical Halos; the following is badly out of context, but still funny.

“Kraft” is the operative word here.