Naming 10,000 Apps

Saturday, 13 Dec 2008

John Gruber:

After that moment of conception, what it is, however nascent, however raw, becomes part of the process. You’re adding to it. Changing it. Removing parts of it. But there is an it, where before there was not.

That reminds me of one of my favourite quotes ever, itself an elaboration on a quote by Lao Tsu.

James P. Carse:

“Before there were the heavens and the earth, there was the unnameable. Naming was the mother of the ten thousand things.” There are no things until there are words to name them. The names do not, therefore, come from the things but from the silence that precedes the act of naming.

From a great continuum, in which everything is latent, naming brings a thing into existence in its own right, in disconnect from its context.