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Comment by ponker | Hacker News Reader

sounds like a type of cancer. open source needs to pay more attention to branding.

I thought so too. It sounds uncomfortably close to "pleurome" which is a French word for pleural cancer. I'm not sure if there is a similar English word. I looked up pleroma, and apparently it is a word of Greek origins which means the fullness of divine excellencies and powers. Quite an ambitious name.

I don't know about French but "oma" is the medical suffix for swelling/growth, whether benign or malignant. E.g. sarcoma/carcinoma/lymphoma/melanoma/hematoma.

It also sounds uncomfortably close to plérôme… hmmm…

It really depends on whether you are a native English speaker from the other side of the Ocean and never heard of other languages, you come from the Old Continent and etymology for you means "Greek and Latin only" or you are from everywhere else and just don't care.

Pleroma means

> (Koinē Greek: πλήρωμα) generally refers to the totality of divine powers

It is also used in the new testament with different meanings, such as

- to fill up an empty thing (e.g. Matthew 13:48), or

- to complete an incomplete thing (e.g. Matthew 5:17);

It sounds good to me as branding.

TBH it also sounds similar to plèura s. f. [Greek πλευρά «side of the body, rib»]. which is the membrane that covers the lungs

You have a good point -- I've never heard of other languages, so that's why it sounded like sarcoma or carcinoma or lymphoma or melanoma or those kinds of words to me.

That was my point: correlation is not causation.

There are a lot of words that ends in oma, not all of them are cancer names.

Just a few from an Italian dictionary

- perizoma (thong)

- policroma (multi-coloured)

- genoma (genome)

- diploma (I think it's diploma as well in English)

I guess the confusion comes from the suffix -òma [Greek -ωμα] + ώματος which reads as matos (ò-matos -> oma) and means different things in scientific terminology

- in medical terms indicates a swelling like ematoma (bruise) or a type of cancer (you know that)

- in biology it means a functional unit (condrioma the set of all the mitochondrion)

Pleroma, instead, comes from the verb πληρόω (it reads plero)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%BB%CE%B7%CF%81%CF%8...

I'm sorry if I can't be more precise, my studies of Greek and Latin ended in high school, decades ago.

Hum, interesting, but that's why I said that open source needs to pay more attention to branding, not to Ovid.

I'd rather say that the rest of the world needs to pay more attention to Ovid, as evidenced by this thread. If open source branding helps with that, more power to it.

If that is the strategy — evangelizing the Classics by naming products that sound vaguely like diseases that encourage further research — I’d have to agree and say more power to them.

I'm not a native English speaker, I speak several languages, I am from Europe, I am interested in etymology, I studied Latin and a tiny bit of Ancient Greek and still didn't know what Pleroma was before I read your comment.

Making it sound like ponker is an illiterate idiot (and playing on the "uneducated American" trope to boot) for not knowing the meaning of Pleroma is frankly arrogant IMO.

Maybe "pleroma" is in more common use in your language but it definitely isn't in many others, and not just for those silly English monolinguals.

> (and playing on the "uneducated American" trope to boot

That wasn't my intention

I literally meant "never heard of"

If you never heard of something, you're not used to how it sounds.

The original poster criticized the branding before knowing the meaning, I explained the meaning and why it is not as bad as it may sounds to someone used to associate "oma" with cancer - which appears a lot in US pop culture, it's a cultural thing, I never implied ignorance -

It's the same thing of Gimp, but on the opposite side, I still pronounce it the Italian way with the soft G as in "jim" and it doesn't bother me, while it reminds pulp fiction's gimp to native speakers (also: I've watched the movie in original language years later it came out)

Finally, to be completely honest, being from Rome I am biased and everything that ends in "Roma" sounds nice to me, I see the name of my city, not the suffix "oma".

Python sounds like a large predatory snake.

named monty

You got very good marks.

Yeah but not too many people have had personal negative experiences with those. Cancer, unfortunately, is not uncommon.

Open-source needs to pay more attention to branding

"A Mastodon-compatible open and federated social networking server" is also completely impenetrable to anyone outside a narrow circle of us geeks.

self-hosted software generally is, that's why some people take of hosting so that the general public can migrate off Facebook and Twitter without having to worry about technical stuff.

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