Well Chosen Names

From the time of the Garden of Eden, man has been NamingThings?. It was the first assignment, as animals passed in front of Adam, he was to name them.

Naming things gives the power of language and ultimately the power of writing things down.

Leading to present memory followed by pass-it-on memory, done by schemes of markings and recordings. From the early grain sacks given in tribute to rulers, man has established record-keeping as an on-going activity.

Calling a thing a horse, instead of an animal with four feet, just as tall as man and able to carry him, is a thing of power and brevity.

So: choose what you call a thing with care. It will give strength to your vocabulary and increase your powers of remembering.

Methinks that most names of things are not so much chosen as rather derived by contraction, lending or contextualization. Lets take a few examples:

Blog shorted from web-log where web is a contextualization of the meaning of web (connected parts) in the context of the internet (for which this also applies)
PC acronym of personal computer - where computer derives from the verb and describes what the thing does
Wiki indeed a counter example even if this is lent from Hawaiian as the connection to quick is non-obvious and rather an inspiration.

I don't know if this applies to the horse example (the etymology of horse is unknown). But surely people not used to horses have named these animals mostly as those that brought them with them.

All of which strengthen the notion that the naming activity whether you ascribe it to choosing or deriving, gives strength to vocabulary and an attendant associative understanding of what the artifact is and does.

This applies particularly to the names a programmer gives to artifacts used while assembling code within programming modules. Using names that are short and understandable, particularly if either yourself or another is to maintain the code in the future.