Thinking outside the pants
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Thomas Clayburn, "Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language", The Register 6/15/2021:
After three decades, Coq, a theorem-proving programming language developed by researchers in France, is being fitted for a new name because it has become impossible to ignore that it sounds like bawdy English slang.
Once referred to as CoC, short for Calculus of Constructions, the programming language became Coq when work on version 5 began in 1989.
The name – according to software engineer Théo Zimmermann's initial entry to the Coq GitHub wiki on April 6 – is a reference to the French word for "rooster," to the Calculus of Constructions, and to the contributions of Thierry Coquand, one of the creators of the language.
Coq also happens to sound like "cock," which while it means both "a male rooster" and "to tilt," can be used informally to refer to the male anatomy. And for some people, that deters community participation.
"This similarity has already led to some women turning away from Coq and others getting harassed when they said they were working on Coq," the project wiki, last updated on Friday, explains. "It also makes some English conversations about Coq with lay persons simply more difficult."
As the cited article explains, the Coq community has not found it easy to decide on a suitable new name:
Members of the Coq community have undertaken the thankless job of evaluating the dozens of suggested new names and, after more than two months of discussion and wiki updates, they've already rejected many for obvious failings.
For example, "Gallus," the Latin word for "rooster" has been discarded because, again, it sounds like a word for a part of the male anatomy.
Then there's "coqi," where the added "i" stands for induction, a mathematical proof technique. Unfortunately, "coqi," it sounds like "коки," evoking Russian slang for another male anatomical feature.
Why not "Cocon," the French word for "cocoon"? Well, "con" isn't quite polite in French as it's slang for a part of the female anatomy. The project wiki notes that this is likely to lead to more jokes, which is the problem that prompted the whole renaming effort.
How about "Bando," Portuguese for a group of roosters? Er, no. Another male anatomy reference in French slang.
But there are some more promising proposals. One possible solution involves extending "Coq" to "Coquand," since the language's name is already derived at least in part from one of its main creators. There's precedent for homage-based branding with languages like Ada, Pascal, and Haskell. It is unclear how Coq's other contributors might feel about this.
They ask outsiders to stay out of it:
Important note: if you had never heard of Coq before reading the article on theregister.com, then your opinion on this matter is not relevant to us. Please don't interfere, thank you very much!
This is all part of (or at least related to) the Inclusive Naming Initiatiave.
Scott P. said,
June 16, 2021 @ 9:11 am
I run a mobile server in the back of my vehicle, I call it Coq au Van.
~flow said,
June 16, 2021 @ 9:27 am
I'd go and suggest they name it Bananas but I feel I was explicitly told to keep mine out of it.
Gregory Kusnick said,
June 16, 2021 @ 9:48 am
Given a rooster's primary function in the barnyard, it shouldn't come a surprise that words for rooster turn out to be bawdy slang in some language or other.
wanda said,
June 16, 2021 @ 10:21 am
In "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," which is an essay that's famous enough to have its own Wikipedia entry, the anthropologist Clifford Hertz claims that the word for rooster "sabung" is also slang for the male anatomy in the Balinese language. (Thus the roosters in cockfights sort of stand in for the men who raise them.) Come to think of it, in Mandarin "Xiaojiji" also means "little chicken," although that's slightly different. Is there something obvious about chicken and penises that I'm missing?
David Marjanović said,
June 16, 2021 @ 10:38 am
Gallus rhymes with phallus, but is that really enough to decide against it…?
The missing link is the tap (as in tap water). German is stuck at this stage and calls various taps Wasserhahn or Zapfhahn, where Hahn is "rooster"; the further extension to the male intromittent organ has not happened there.
Andreas said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:11 am
I wonder if it would be confusing to name it Coquand, given that Thierry is currently mostly working with Agda
George said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:21 am
Being Irish, 'rooster' simply isn't part of the language I speak and I consider it to be a prime example of bowdlerisation. After all, hens also roost. For me, 'coq' is the French word for 'cock'. And as it's been quite a while since I was 10 years old, I somehow manage not to snigger when I hear the word.
George said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:26 am
@David Marjanović
I would imagine that it came to mean 'tap' via the 'male intromittent organ' and that it's just that the intermediary usage has been forgotten.
D.O. said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:30 am
If I were not prohibited from doing so, I would suggest Quand. It's the last part of Coquand and the first part of QED. It might discombobulate people who know Latin, but they don't seem to be a vulnerable group. It also might be or sound like a word for some part of the male or female anatomy, to an unsavory sexual acts, or something else bad in one of the 6000 languages and their innumerable dialects and argots, but there should be some clean words, right? Maybe it's one of them.
david said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:35 am
"Rooster" itself is a euphemism "favored in the US as a puritan alternative." Many domestic fowls roost.
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:51 am
This reminds me of the time I heard some Asian people refer to Sriracha as “cock sauce”.
(It’s sometimes called “rooster sauce” here in the US because of the male chicken pictured on the bottle.)
DaveK said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:54 am
@George:
An old-fashioned wooden tap for a keg does look a little like a chicken sitting on a nest. When I first found out it as Wasserhahn in German, I assumed this was the origin of the term. I later found out that Hahn means rooster, not hen but it’s quite possible that the term stuck around because it fit both the form and function.
Bathrobe said,
June 16, 2021 @ 11:59 am
Ondori 'cock, rooster; in Japanese doesn't seem to have any untoward connotations. And it's easy to say.
Philip Taylor said,
June 16, 2021 @ 12:26 pm
"Quand. It's the last part of Coquand and the first part of QED". Really ? I thought that the first part of QED was quod. But it is almost 60 years since I last studied Latin, so I may well be mistaken.
D.O. said,
June 16, 2021 @ 12:43 pm
Philip Taylor, yes! How stupid of me. Ok, either quand or quod will do.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 16, 2021 @ 1:08 pm
May I suggest BAPL (pronounced to rhyme with "apple") as an initialism for "Boringly Asexual Programming Language"?
J.W. Brewer said,
June 16, 2021 @ 1:14 pm
While "rooster" may have originally come to predominate in the U.S. for euphemistic reasons, I think that after enough generations it just became the standard word for the referent outside specific collocations like "cockfight" or "cock and bull story." As a native speaker, it doesn't "feel* to me like a euphemism in the sense that I would not naturally use a less euphemistic synonym in the sort of conversational context where one would deliberately choose vulgarity over euphemism for sociolinguistic reasons.
kltpzyxm said,
June 16, 2021 @ 1:27 pm
@wanda – Well, you do have 鸡巴 (jiba chicken-suffix) which is one of the most common slang terms for penis.
Bob Ladd said,
June 16, 2021 @ 4:23 pm
@David Marjanović, George: German Hahn for 'tap' involves the same semantic extension as English cock in compounds like stopcock and ballcock. The metaphor that gets us from male chicken to a plumbing valve is certainly obscure, and it may or may not involve male genitals in one direction or the other, but somehow it must be the same metaphor in both languages.
John F said,
June 16, 2021 @ 4:46 pm
My french pronunciation may be rusty, but if ‘con’ is not acceptable, then I’m not sure ‘quand’ would be any better. How about ‘Noclac’? Calcon backwards.
Reminds me of the small sports car Toyota used to make called the MR2, which is a very boring name in English as it means Mid engine Rear wheel drive, but in French it sounds like poo.
Andrew Myers said,
June 16, 2021 @ 4:59 pm
Isn't "coq" pronounced more like "caulk" than "cock"? As a sometime user of the software, that's the way I say it, and it seems to reduce the level of Beavis-style sniggering.
Viseguy said,
June 16, 2021 @ 6:14 pm
If I were welcome to weigh in, I'd suggest Capon, Chapon in French (or so Google Translate tells me).
Michael said,
June 16, 2021 @ 6:48 pm
Obviously they should just name it "Programming Language Mcprogramminglanguageface."
AntC said,
June 16, 2021 @ 7:07 pm
Yeah. When I first heard about this, I thought: political correctness getting out of hand/just put up with it. (There were plenty of puns on COBOL and cobblers/cob-balls back in the day.)
You could put on an Inspector Clouseau accent, and a thick Langue d'Òc superfluous nasal and gratuitous extra syllable: Cõq-eu
Is German going to find a different word for the integer between five and seven? Or for the word meaning ride/trip/journey?
precedent for homage-based branding with languages like Ada, Pascal, and Haskell.
'Ada' and 'Haskell' are forenames — then 'Thierry'?
Jonathan said,
June 16, 2021 @ 10:06 pm
Hmmm… I always wondered why my Computer-based Ultimate Network Technology never took off. Maybe now I have a clue.
Bloix said,
June 16, 2021 @ 10:44 pm
It's odd the article never mentions that the cock – "le coq galoise" – is the French national symbol. Asking these folks to change the name of their company is like saying that an American company can't be named Eagle.
Bloix said,
June 16, 2021 @ 10:49 pm
PS –
I once said at work, sarcastically, that some unpleasant development "just warms the cockles of my heart." A younger colleague looked like she couldn't decide whether to be shocked. I haven't used that expression again.
Lasius said,
June 17, 2021 @ 3:26 am
@Bob Ladd
Have a look at this 15th century woodcut by Albrecht Dürer.
https://sammlung.staedelmuseum.de/de/werk/das-maennerbad
It shows that old taps often had the form of a rooster, but the position of the tap is also interesting.
cube said,
June 17, 2021 @ 1:05 pm
All this pussyfooting around the word "penis" seems out of character for a *language* blog that's so forthright about so many topics.
Terry K. said,
June 17, 2021 @ 3:41 pm
What I find linguistically interesting is that, in my head, coq and cock sound very different. Coq is /kɔk/ (and like caulk, except shorter). Cock is /kɑk/ or /kak/ (it seems that phoneme gets rendered both ways and I don't have any sense which is better here). But I'm quite aware that hearing someone else say them, it's not so clear, and I can't claim for sure that I'd never hear /kɔk/ as cock.
Keith said,
June 17, 2021 @ 5:23 pm
This ridiculous desire to avoid the word "cock" annoyed me for all the seven years that I lived in the USA.
In England (being English, I shan't presume to write on behalf of the people from Ireland, Scotland or Wales), people don't have any trouble interpreting the message when this word is used in different contexts, such as to mean a tap to control the flow of water, a male bird, a particular part of the fletching of an arrow, the "alpha male" in a group or indeed a part of (mammalian and more particularly human) male genitalia.
The request from the article is funny.
Everybody will have heard of Coq/Cock before! This looks to me like typical El Reg humour.
tz said,
June 18, 2021 @ 5:29 am
1. 'Cock' doesn't actually sound like 'Coq' – this is obvious to anyone who speaks English and French
2. What is this, a return to 19th century puritanism? The sheer chutzpah from English speakers to demand that foreign languages don't offend their delicate ears
Philip Taylor said,
June 18, 2021 @ 9:00 am
"Everybody will have heard of Coq/Cock before! This looks to me like typical El Reg humour" — Unconvinced. While I agree that most of the English speaking world will be familiar with "cock", the fraction who are familiar with "coq" (with its meaning of "a theorem-proving programming language developed by researchers in France") would, I would suggest, be vanishingly small. And as it is clear (to me, at least) that the authors of the article were referring to "coq" only with this very restricted meaning, I don't think that any humour was intended.
Martha said,
June 18, 2021 @ 2:40 pm
I'm curious about the assertion that Americans have a "desire to avoid the word cock." I wouldn't say that Americans have a desire to avoid it any more than we have a "desire to avoid" any other word that other varieties of English use more than American English does.
I (American) don't go out of my way not to use the word "cock" — "rooster" is just the word for a male chicken just like "boar" is the word for a male pig. Baby roosters are still called "cockerels." (I grew up around chickens, FWIW, and "cock" seems to be only used when referring to roosters that you make fight each other.) No one seems afraid to talk about peacocks.
SusanC said,
June 19, 2021 @ 8:02 am
That theorem prover’s unfortunate name (at least, for English speakers) has been a well-known issue for ages. Well, the kind of person who knew anything about theorem provers knew the name was unfortunate. And even I knew it was a theorem prover.
Interesting that they’re only addressing it now.
I hazard a guess: this is a symptom of society in general become less tolerant of mild offensiveness. (As far as I know, the name was not deliberately chosen as a bilingual pun).
SusanC said,
June 19, 2021 @ 8:08 am
A software project I am familiar with names version releases by taking words that have a common theme, taking the one that starts with the next letter of the alphabet … subject to the constraint that a Google search does not find offensive connotations in any major language,
The last bit is interesting … that organizations are resorting to Google as a check for unintended offensiveness of product names,
SusanC said,
June 19, 2021 @ 9:28 am
And Katholieke Universiteit Leuven is not usually abbreviated as kul (cul), at least not within earshot of any Francophone Belgians,
stephen said,
June 19, 2021 @ 10:45 am
AntC said,
Is German going to find a different word for the integer between five and seven? Or for the word meaning ride/trip/journey?
'Ada' and 'Haskell' are forenames — then 'Thierry'?
What word meaning ride/trip/journey is being referred to? Is it the German word Fahrt?
I agree with Thierry. You could also abbreviate rooster, Roos, Roost,
Ter, Ster, Ooster. Hen, Henster, chick, chickster.
Jonathan said,
Hmmm… I always wondered why my Computer-based Ultimate Network Technology never took off. Maybe now I have a clue.
I suppose everybody in the country will continue to feel contempt for anybody who continues to contaminate their language with that word. It is often hard to control the construction of new words to contain new ideas. Contractions may not be much better at avoiding offensive initial syllables.
I notice Wikipedia has an article on The Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) is a committee of the European Parliament. I wonder if people get in trouble mispronouncing that acronym?
Frans said,
June 20, 2021 @ 5:48 am
@SusanC
I can't tell if you're a fellow Dutch speaker, but as a general remark, kul means bullshit (in the sense of blathering nonsense). Especially in this context, I think that's surely far more offensive than the word ass.