#naming — Public Fediverse posts

Oy cunts. Help me pronombulate the nonbinary version of a "Trad Wife" / house spouse.
Coin the term! That was the phrase.
I do like house spoonie, too tbh.

#nomenclature #enby #NonBinary #NonBinaryPositivity #queer #GenderNonConforming #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #LGBTQIA2S #name #linguistics #naming #phrase #dictionary #phenomenon #trend #social #groups #NonBinarity #InternationalNonBinaryDay #InternationalNonBinarityDay

Oy cunts. Help me pronombulate the nonbinary version of a "Trad Wife" / house spouse.
Coin the term! That was the phrase.
I do like house spoonie, too tbh.

#nomenclature #enby #NonBinary #NonBinaryPositivity #queer #GenderNonConforming #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #LGBTQIA2S #name #linguistics #naming #phrase #dictionary #phenomenon #trend #social #groups #NonBinarity #InternationalNonBinaryDay #InternationalNonBinarityDay

Oy cunts. Help me pronombulate the nonbinary version of a "Trad Wife" / house spouse.
Coin the term! That was the phrase.
I do like house spoonie, too tbh.

#nomenclature #enby #NonBinary #NonBinaryPositivity #queer #GenderNonConforming #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #LGBTQIA2S #name #linguistics #naming #phrase #dictionary #phenomenon #trend #social #groups #NonBinarity #InternationalNonBinaryDay #InternationalNonBinarityDay

Oy cunts. Help me pronombulate the nonbinary version of a "Trad Wife" / house spouse.
Coin the term! That was the phrase.
I do like house spoonie, too tbh.

#nomenclature #enby #NonBinary #NonBinaryPositivity #queer #GenderNonConforming #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #LGBTQIA2S #name #linguistics #naming #phrase #dictionary #phenomenon #trend #social #groups #NonBinarity #InternationalNonBinaryDay #InternationalNonBinarityDay

Oy cunts. Help me pronombulate the nonbinary version of a "Trad Wife" / house spouse.
Coin the term! That was the phrase.
I do like house spoonie, too tbh.

#nomenclature #enby #NonBinary #NonBinaryPositivity #queer #GenderNonConforming #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #LGBTQIA2S #name #linguistics #naming #phrase #dictionary #phenomenon #trend #social #groups #NonBinarity #InternationalNonBinaryDay #InternationalNonBinarityDay

How to Name Your App (and Get the Best Trademark), by (not on Mastodon or Bluesky):

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-name-your-app-and-get-the-best-trademark/

#howtos #naming #legal

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

The observation is correct as far as it travels, and the format of a televised exchange does not give a thinker of Sontag’s caliber room to develop the qualifications she would have written into print. Sontag is reliable on the surface phenomena. The deathbed scene she describes, where family secrets surface around mortality, is psychologically accurate. Her returning voyager who brings news from elsewhere is one of the oldest functions of narrative, traceable from Odysseus through Marco Polo and Mary Kingsley to the embedded war correspondent. We are also gripped, as Sontag says, by stories precisely because they describe what cannot happen. Readers of Kafka know Gregor Samsa did not wake as an insect, and that knowledge intensifies the story’s force.

Where Sontag falters is in locating this doubleness at “the very center of the whole enterprise of storytelling.” The tension she identifies is a feature of post-Enlightenment English usage. Other languages partition the territory differently. German separates Geschichte from Erzählung, the chronicle from the tale. Ancient Greek separates mythos from logos and historia. Sanskrit holds itihasa, the account of what happened, distinct from purana, the ancient telling. Yoruba oral tradition separates itan, the sacred and ancestral narrative, from àló, the entertaining household tale. The ambiguity Sontag treats as constitutive is partly an artifact of English vocabulary collapsing distinctions that other tongues hold apart. To say storytelling faces two directions, truth and lie, is to inherit a Cartesian frame that pre-modern peoples would have found alien to the question.

This is exactly where Joseph Campbell would intervene. For Campbell, the truth-versus-fiction axis was a symptom of modern literalism, useful for tracking what one cultural moment had lost but useless for explaining how myth operates. Drawing on Jung and on comparative anthropology, he argued that stories carry psychological reality independent of historical reality. The hero’s descent to the underworld, the dying and rising god, the trickster who exposes the king, these belong to a third register that Sontag’s binary cannot accommodate. They register as neither historical claim nor fantasy opposed to fact. As Campbell argued throughout his career, mythology is what we call other people’s religion, and he was pointing at the failure of the truth/lie axis to capture what religious narrative does for those who live inside it.

Campbell would likely call Sontag’s voyager model one motif among several, including myths of descent, metamorphosis, cosmogony, and trickster disruption, while also insisting that the voyager holds special centrality because it externalizes the interior process by which the soul ventures into the unconscious and returns with knowledge. He traced this structure from the shamanic vision quest through Joyce’s Ulysses into the popular cinema of his late life, and his reading of Star Wars as a contemporary monomyth was either his most generous gift to popular culture or his most embarrassing capitulation to it, depending on which scholar you read. Maureen Murdock’s challenge to the male hero’s quest, developed in The Heroine’s Journey in 1990, sharpened the critique that Campbell’s pattern was less universal than his rhetoric implied. Robert Ellwood in The Politics of Myth and Brendan Gill in The New York Review of Books raised harder questions about Campbell’s politics and his unguarded private writings, and those critiques have not been resolved by his admirers so much as set aside.

Even granting those qualifications, Campbell’s instinct about register stands. He saw that stories carry meaning along a vertical axis, downward into the unconscious and upward into shared cultural reference, and the truth/lie binary slices that axis horizontally and loses the depth.

Saul Kripke offers a second escape from Sontag’s binary, arriving from a tradition Campbell never engaged. In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1973 and published as Reference and Existence in 2013, Kripke extended the rigid-designator theory of his Naming and Necessity to fictional and mythological names, arguing that such names refer to abstract objects brought into existence by the storytelling act itself. The name “Odysseus” refers, in Kripke’s account, to a fictional character: an abstract artifact created by Homeric composition and sustained by every subsequent reader and translator who has carried that reference forward. Kripke gives storytelling a creative-ontological power Sontag’s truth/fiction frame cannot register. Two traditions sharing almost no methodological vocabulary, depth psychology and analytic philosophy of language, arrive at the same conclusion: the truth/lie axis fails because storytelling produces a third class of object the axis cannot measure.

There is a temperamental and political difference between Sontag and Campbell worth naming directly. Sontag wrote in the long aftermath of the Holocaust and the Cold War, suspicious of any totalizing narrative. She had watched fascism weaponize national myth in Germany and Italy, and her caution reflects that experience honestly. Campbell was an American comparativist working in the wake of Frazer and Jung, drawn to pattern across cultures, and his posthumously published journals raised real questions about his political instincts. Sontag’s suspicion functions as a corrective against political weaponization. Campbell’s pattern recognition functions as recognition of common structure across cultures that have never met. The disagreement between them is genuine and should not be smoothed over for the comfort of synthesis.

My position is partial agreement with Sontag and deeper agreement with the Campbell answer she did not stay alive long enough to receive. The truth/fiction ambiguity she describes belongs to modern Western reading habits and shows up wherever those habits travel. The deeper question of what narrative does across cultures requires a different lens. Campbell goes closer to the bone when he asks what stories do across human societies, treating function as the proper unit of analysis, which lets him see patterns Sontag’s frame keeps hidden. Stories organize experience, transmit pattern across generations, rehearse mortality, model possible selves, and bind communities through shared reference. Whether the events “really happened” is a question that stories themselves typically dissolve, which is why we still read Homer and the Book of Job long after their cosmologies have been falsified.

The synthesis Sontag misses, Campbell only gestures toward, and Kripke names from a third direction is that stories operate at multiple registers simultaneously: as durable structures of consciousness, as historically situated cultural artifacts, and as creators of abstract reference objects that take on real life within communities who carry the names forward. The Odyssey is psychologically accurate about return and recognition, it is a specific Bronze Age Greek text carrying specific class and gender assumptions, and it brought “Odysseus” into existence as a name that refers to something real, even if not historical. Collapsing any of these registers into another impoverishes the reading. Sontag’s caution prevents the first kind of collapse, where myth becomes a timeless template that erases the particular hands that made the particular text. Campbell’s depth prevents the second kind of collapse, where a poem becomes a museum object emptied of the psychological force it still exerts on readers who pick it up. Kripke prevents a third collapse altogether, the one in which storytelling is denied its world-making authority and reduced to description of things that already exist. None of the three alone reaches the full target.

What Sontag could not see from the angle of her camera is that the voyager she names as one model among many is the externalization of the tension she places at the center of storytelling. The voyager who returns with news is also the dreamer who returns from the underworld. The bringer of facts and the bringer of vision occupy the same archetypal position, which is why storytelling moves along a single descending axis with truth and invention braided together at the bottom of the well. Sontag stopped at the doorway. Campbell walked down the stairs.

#Design #Guides
Design token naming conventions · Building a clear, consistent, and scalable structure https://ilo.im/16ce4h

_____
#Naming #Conventions #DesignTokens #DesignSystems #UiDesign #WebDesign #Development #WebDev #Frontend

"... With this arrival, this conquest, one idea reigns supreme. You are a numbers person. You believe in possession through measuring the thing. The land is this many metres, the elevation is this high off the ground. Where a traveller may have seen the land, been curious about what 50 names say about the tree, already your mind was quartering, the stake hammered right in..."

"Possession—the numbers game—requires brute strength and the willingness to eradicate the speakers too."

- Yumna Kassab, The Conquest of Land and Dream

#land #biodiversity #life #quality #diversity #dispossession #commodification #quantifiability #ratability #scalability #values #language #naming #LanguagePolicies #SettlerSociety #EuropeanColonisation #IndigenousPeoples #writers

https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-conquest-of-land-and-dream/

Oh, joy! Yet another riveting tome on #naming #conventions in Go. Because, obviously, without a "practical guide" 🤓, developers would be adrift in a sea of indecipherable variable names, forever lost. 🌊🚢 Just what the world needs: another book treating us like we have the naming #skills of a toddler. 🍼📚
https://www.alexedwards.net/blog/go-naming-conventions #GoLang #Developer #Humor #Practical #Guide #Coding #HackerNews #ngated

Go Naming Conventions: A Practical Guide

https://www.alexedwards.net/blog/go-naming-conventions

#HackerNews #Go #Naming #Conventions #Practical #Guide #Coding #BestPractices #SoftwareDevelopment

/I'm/ not doing an exhaustive deep dive into moss species names/nicknames, /you're/ doing an exhaustive deep dive into moss species names/nicknames!!! 😝

#Naming #NamingOfThings #NamingThingsIsHard #HardestProblemInComputerScience #Hostname #Hostnames #ComputerNames #E_TOOMANYHASHTAGS

Neueröffnung! Alles zum halben Preis. 🎉

https://thegoodwork.blog/posts/sorry-were-open

#kreation #blogging #writing #naming #brand #thegoodwork

Hey everyone, remember that project I am working on called OSES (Open Source Education System)?

(If not: it's a free, open educational program to help people overcome barriers and reach their potential—covering subjects such as critical thinking, psychology, communication, systems thinking & community development. More details in my pinned post: https://autistics.life/@murdoc/114175617261126366)

The project is almost ready for its first alpha release (v0.1)! I'll be putting it online soon for early review and feedback.

However, "OSES" was always a placeholder. I want a name that will appeal to more people, so I need your help choosing one.

Here is a link to a quick survey/poll to vote. The poll will be open for about a week.
https://framaforms.org/project-naming-survey-1772612666

I'll share results and may ask some follow-up questions afterward. Thanks!

#education #OpenEducation #naming #poll #feedback #OER #selfimprovement #CriticalThinking #OSES

Hey everyone, remember that project I am working on called OSES (Open Source Education System)?

(If not: it's a free, open educational program to help people overcome barriers and reach their potential—covering subjects such as critical thinking, psychology, communication, systems thinking & community development. More details in my pinned post: https://autistics.life/@murdoc/114175617261126366)

The project is almost ready for its first alpha release (v0.1)! I'll be putting it online soon for early review and feedback.

However, "OSES" was always a placeholder. I want a name that will appeal to more people, so I need your help choosing one.

Here is a link to a quick survey/poll to vote. The poll will be open for about a week.
https://framaforms.org/project-naming-survey-1772612666

I'll share results and may ask some follow-up questions afterward. Thanks!

#education #OpenEducation #naming #poll #feedback #OER #selfimprovement #CriticalThinking #OSES

Hey everyone, remember that project I am working on called OSES (Open Source Education System)?

(If not: it's a free, open educational program to help people overcome barriers and reach their potential—covering subjects such as critical thinking, psychology, communication, systems thinking & community development. More details in my pinned post: https://autistics.life/@murdoc/114175617261126366)

The project is almost ready for its first alpha release (v0.1)! I'll be putting it online soon for early review and feedback.

However, "OSES" was always a placeholder. I want a name that will appeal to more people, so I need your help choosing one.

Here is a link to a quick survey/poll to vote. The poll will be open for about a week.
https://framaforms.org/project-naming-survey-1772612666

I'll share results and may ask some follow-up questions afterward. Thanks!

#education #OpenEducation #naming #poll #feedback #OER #selfimprovement #CriticalThinking #OSES

Hey everyone, remember that project I am working on called OSES (Open Source Education System)?

(If not: it's a free, open educational program to help people overcome barriers and reach their potential—covering subjects such as critical thinking, psychology, communication, systems thinking & community development. More details in my pinned post: https://autistics.life/@murdoc/114175617261126366)

The project is almost ready for its first alpha release (v0.1)! I'll be putting it online soon for early review and feedback.

However, "OSES" was always a placeholder. I want a name that will appeal to more people, so I need your help choosing one.

Here is a link to a quick survey/poll to vote. The poll will be open for about a week.
https://framaforms.org/project-naming-survey-1772612666

I'll share results and may ask some follow-up questions afterward. Thanks!

#education #OpenEducation #naming #poll #feedback #OER #selfimprovement #CriticalThinking #OSES

Hey everyone, remember that project I am working on called OSES (Open Source Education System)?

(If not: it's a free, open educational program to help people overcome barriers and reach their potential—covering subjects such as critical thinking, psychology, communication, systems thinking & community development. More details in my pinned post: https://autistics.life/@murdoc/114175617261126366)

The project is almost ready for its first alpha release (v0.1)! I'll be putting it online soon for early review and feedback.

However, "OSES" was always a placeholder. I want a name that will appeal to more people, so I need your help choosing one.

Here is a link to a quick survey/poll to vote. The poll will be open for about a week.
https://framaforms.org/project-naming-survey-1772612666

I'll share results and may ask some follow-up questions afterward. Thanks!

#education #OpenEducation #naming #poll #feedback #OER #selfimprovement #CriticalThinking #OSES

‘Kinda’ Envious Of How Imaginative And Yet Descriptive Cartographers Can Sometimes Be In Their Naming – The ~250 mi², Man-Made Kawkawlin Flooding, MI
--
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tWR2CA9bAKsMs3Zh6 <-- shared @GoogleMaps link
--
https://youtu.be/3bOsTeL4lTk?si=9YXT5QfdQTneOQ9D <-- shared River Runners: Episode 6 | Kawkawlin Creek Flooding video
--
[working in the area, and noticed...]
“This is a select area of State Forest land, which is managed cooperatively for wildlife by the [MI] DNR Wildlife and Forestry Divisions…”
#water #hydrography #hydrology #mapping #manmade #MI #Michigan #wildlife #preserve #Kawkawlin #Flooding #KawkawlinFlooding #habitat #ecosystem #wetland #mapping #cartography #naming
@MichiganDNR

CSS “@ scope”: An Alternative to Naming Conventions and Heavy Abstractions, by @smashingmag:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/02/css-scope-alternative-naming-conventions/

#css #scope #naming

Kinda interesting.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/unified-secops/microsoft-threat-actor-naming

#Hacker #HackerGroups #ThreatActors #Naming #Microsoft

"Over the past few years, I've become more frustrated with the terms 'Unit' and 'Integration' because I have to explain what 'Unit' and 'Integration' mean before I can use them."

#automatedtesting #unit #vs #integration #naming #classic

https://ted.dev/articles/2023/04/02/i-m-done-with-unit-and-integration-tests/

What Does “Hidden” Actually Mean in Accessible Name Computation?, by (not on Mastodon or Bluesky):

https://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/hidden-content.html

#accessibility #naming #hiding

🤦‍♂️ Oh, the irony of a tech blog complaining about Intel's #naming schemes while proudly flaunting Frankenstein's monster of a workstation! 🚀🔧 Let's hope your 96GB RAM monstrosity can compute the #humor in whining about product names while juggling a 13-disk SSD circus! 🎪💾
https://lorendb.dev/posts/getting-bitten-by-poor-naming-schemes/ #techirony #workstation #Intel #96GBRAM #HackerNews #ngated

Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming scenes

https://lorendb.dev/posts/getting-bitten-by-poor-naming-schemes/

#HackerNews #Intel #Naming #Schemes #Poor #Naming #Issues #Tech #Industry #Intel #News #Software #Development

What is it with people naming things without thinking?

There is a daycare / early childhood education business in a strip mall in my city, with a big sign out front advertising itself.

The business name on that sign? "ONCE UPON A CHILD".

Scout's honour. Sheesh!

#name #naming #NamingThings #business #inappropriate #WTF #wat #sheesh

Spoiler: It's because of #capitalism!

Al Muqaddimah: *Muhammad is now the MOST COMMON Baby Name in EUROPE!!!*

"How did #Muhammad become the most Popular Baby Name in the World?!"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=x6WYH3kUwq4

#Islam #Muslims #naming

Chọn tên cho dự án: ScamAI hay WebVetted? Dự án xây dựng công cụ kiểm tra trực tuyến. C_NEED #ScamAI #WebVetted #DựÁnMới #CôngCụKiểmTra #TrựcTuyến #TênDựÁn #LựaChọnTên #NewProject #OnlineTool #Naming

https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1oq4tpr/help_me_choose_a_name_scamai_vs_webvetted/

What's in a name? that which we call as a method
By any other name would work as correctly.
(After WS.)

We say "comma-separated values", but we do
>>> ','.join(("foo", "bar", "baz"))
'foo,bar,baz'

Wherefore art thou Joiner—or Separator...

#ComputerProgramming
#Names
#Naming
#ObjectCentric
#ObjectOriented
#Paraphrases
#ProgrammingLanguages
#RJ
#Rose

«Ленин хостел» звучит практически как «Ленина пакет». #names #naming #hostels #MW #LeninaPaket #Ленинапакет #conscioushiphop #VanyaAivan @[email protected]

https://www.evshift.com/336793/rtalk-with-sylvia-dos-santos-naming-manager-at-renault-renault-clio-full-hybrid-e-tech/ R:Talk with Sylvia Dos Santos, naming manager at Renault | Renault Clio full hybrid E-Tech #CLIO #Dos #ElectricCars #ElectricVehicles #ETECH #EV #Full #Hybrid #manager #naming #renault #RenaultUK #RTalk #santos #Sylvia

⚙️ Ah, the age-old battle of #naming tables! #Singular or plural? 🤔 Clearly, this #debate will revolutionize #database #management as we know it. 🙄 Meanwhile, real-world problems await while we ponder the cosmic implications of "user" vs. "users." 🌌
https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/use-singular-nouns-for-database-table-names.html #conventions #plural #tech #real #world #issues #HackerNews #ngated

What's the name for the fear of people with phobias? 🤔

#question #pun #phobia #naming

What's the name for the fear of not having any phobia? 🤔

#question #pun #phobia #naming

What are you devices (laptops, phones, servers, etc.) named after? My theme is greek mythology: gods, heros and monsters.
My PiHole is named after argus, the all-seeing giant. My laptop that I often took on journeys is named odysseus. The home server is named herakles, because of all the different tasks it fulfils.

I also heard of someone using place names of famous disasters like Chernobyl, Hindenburg or Deepwater Horizion.

What‘s your theme?

Boosts appreciated.

#names #naming #hostname #computer #server #laptop #desktop

#Business #Approaches
Strategies for naming your side project · A starting point for finding the perfect project name https://ilo.im/163ks9

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#Naming #SideProjects #Projects #Creativity #Design #ProductDesign #WebDesign #Development #WebDev

#Development #Pitfalls
The mostly true naming rule · “Do not give multiple names to the same thing.” https://ilo.im/163est

_____
#Programming #Coding #Naming #Conventions #Variables #WebDev #Frontend #HTML #Backend #SQL

On a déjà parlé de naming en mode théorie. Passons maintenant à la pratique. Comment choisir le nom de son activité sans trop se planter. Vous avez deux heures ...

Et si vous séchez, voici quelques pistes :
https://delphineneimon.com/choix-nom-activite/

#naming #nomdentreprise #activité #baptisersonprojet #Entreprise #communication #communicationdigitale #marketing

Defending Tailwind, by @donnie:

https://blog.damato.design/posts/defending-tailwind/

#tailwind #presentationalcss #naming #productivity #maintainability #scaling

Defending Tailwind, by @donnie:

https://blog.damato.design/posts/defending-tailwind/

#tailwind #presentationalcss #naming #productivity #maintainability #scaling

Defending Tailwind, by @donnie:

https://blog.damato.design/posts/defending-tailwind/

#tailwind #presentationalcss #naming #productivity #maintainability #scaling

Defending Tailwind, by @donnie:

https://blog.damato.design/posts/defending-tailwind/

#tailwind #presentationalcss #naming #productivity #maintainability #scaling

Defending Tailwind, by @donnie:

https://blog.damato.design/posts/defending-tailwind/

#tailwind #presentationalcss #naming #productivity #maintainability #scaling

There is no doubt one of the most difficult things on software engineering is naming things, 30% of my Gen-AI prompts end with "give me a list of 10 options/names/titles for ..."

#softwareengineering #naming #AIprompts