Words

2026-06-01

Jun 01, 2026

One must be careful to understand that words carry much more baggage than just their literal dictionary meaning.

In songwriting, I was taught to lean heavily on the thesaurus for several reasons, such as
- syllable count, and syllable emphasis to match underlying melody flow
- plosives, fricatives, etc., to evoke “feeling” that matches with the rest of the intent of the song
- brainstorming - just looking at synonyms can trigger thoughts and new ideas on a custom / personal basis
- rhymes and B-rhymes
- imagery

There are lots of examples of this kind of thing, but I most reminded of Robert Frost’s “The Span of Life” - a two-line poem that evokes lots of imagery:

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

For example, note that “barks” ends in a fricative “s” which allows a smooth flow into “backwards”. Both words begin with a plosive “b” which makes the phrase pop out and evoke the image of barking. There’s lots more going on here…

Lispers tend to use long names in code, whereas non-lispers see this as being verbose. “Ret” instead of “return” can be a readability issue as well as a writability issue (akin to the use of Greek letters in math).

Inference: each consumer of words can get a completely different meaning from a phrase, hence, one cannot always achieve perfect transmission of intent. Great songwriters make their songs touch many people, great software architects arrange designs in ways that are more readable. Great code is not always great architecture. Code is for machines. Arrangement of code to express design intent is for people.

Programming Simplicity

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Programming Simplicity

Words

2026-06-01

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