I care way too much about what things are called. Projects, systems, random folders on my desktop. I’ll sit there for longer than I should, trying to figure out if the name feels right. It’s probably a problem.
But I’ve also realized that naming something is one of the first meaningful choices you make. A name is the story you tell before anyone knows what the thing actually does. It shapes how people relate to it, how they remember it, whether they even bother looking twice.
This obsession didn’t come from engineering. It came from an article I stumbled onto years ago, about tea, of all things.
Here’s the thing: with almost no exceptions, there are only two ways to say “tea” anywhere in the world. Some version of cha, or some version of te. Chai in Hindi. Thé in French. Tea in English. Té in Spanish.
Both trace back to the same Chinese character. But how they spread tells you everything about how humans moved and traded.
The cha form traveled overland along the Silk Road. Chay in Persian, shay in Arabic, chai in Swahili. The te form moved by sea, carried by Dutch traders from ports where it was pronounced te. From there: thee, thé, tea.
Two syllables. Two trade routes. Two ways of connecting civilizations.
What got me wasn’t just the etymology it was what the story represented. A single word holding the memory of how people moved, traded, and shared ideas across centuries. When you say “tea,” you’re echoing ships that crossed the Indian Ocean hundreds of years ago. When you say “chai,” you’re invoking the dust of the Silk Road.
And then I noticed: even within India, the same divide exists. In the north, people say chai. But my family, from the south, says tea. I never thought about it before. Now I can’t stop seeing it as a tiny record of geography and trade, baked into how we talk.
That story rewired how I think about names. They’re not arbitrary labels. They’re architecture, built to hold meaning, memory, identity.
Every name has an origin. Sometimes it starts as a joke, or a placeholder that stuck. But over time it becomes part of how people understand and interact with the thing itself. A good name lasts because it captures essence, not implementation. It gives structure to meaning the way a foundation gives shape to a building.
When I name something now, I think about what pattern it leaves behind. Will it still mean something in a few years? Will it grow with the thing it represents, or fight against it?
That’s why I care. Naming isn’t a detail to finalize at the end, it’s a way of giving something identity before it even exists.
Every name is a story in shorthand. Every story is a map of connection. And sometimes, an ordinary word like tea can tell you everything about how the world got built.