pet name
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A pet name is a local, typically private, nickname or short-name that a person uses for another person or organization; mobile phone contacts entries are a common example, with user-defined names like “Mom”.
Criticism
Tantek Çelik - I dislike the term “petname” because it sounds like whoever is making/using them is treating their contacts like pets, which is both a ridiculous and frankly patronizing framing. reference from chat
Eddie Hinkle - I'm not really a huge fan of the term petname but I don't know that there is a better term. The definition of petname is "a term of address used to express affection" . reference from chat
- Since nickname is an array of strings, I might just make the first entry of nickname always be MY nickname, and any others in the array are nicknames from the person' h-card. I think anything more than nickname is really just trying to force it into a box that doesn't match
- In the US I think the term petname provides some assumption of silliness or intimacy. Like a high school couple might have "pet names" for each other.
Aaron Parecki - I really don't like the term petname reference from chat
gRegor Morrill - I've only heard "pet names" in terms of nicknames for romantic partners. reference from chat
- I think "nickname" and "private nickname" work fine currently, don't necessarily need a new term. reference from chat
See Also
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocorism
- Discussion based on a write-up (including example) of petnames by cwebber
- An Introduction to Petname Systems by Marc Stiegler describes the envisioned different between petnames and nicknames, and some of its use-cases
- 2022-10-26 : Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming (archived), released through The Spritely Institute, details a proposed user experience design for a petname system that would likely work well for a nicknames-cache as well.
- name
- nickname
- nicknames-cache