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[Conor McBride <conor AT strictlypositive.org>]

I'll tell you a true story or two.

I used to live in Durham. In particular, I used to live in Beaver Close, Pity 
Me, Durham.
Which is too far from Durham railway station to walk, if you have any amount 
of
luggage. So I would get a taxi from the railway station to "Abbey Leisure 
Centre",
because it saved a conversation with a taxi driver on a "live up to its name, 
does it?"
theme.

And I know that's *nothing* compared to what people here have had to put up 
with,
in the rest of their lives, talking about what they do. I've certainly had to 
help
students who are native speakers of neither English nor French and have been
fooled into saying things that garnered laughter at their expense.

But what do I know? I got kicked off twitter.

Facepalm

Conor


> On 6 Apr 2021, at 22:44, Fabian Kunze <fabian.kunze AT cs.uni-saarland.de> 
> wrote:
> 
> One should consider that not only people in America speak english, but a 
> lot of the scientific communication, and university-level education on Coq 
> in other countries (like Germany) is in english.
> And several stories on this thread showed that the name was something 
> between 'a minor inconvenience' and 'a reason I would rather be in another 
> place now' for some people, so teaching and communication about Coq where 
> partly effected because of that name. (If I remember the Code of Conduct of 
> Coq developers right, this is something they want to consider.)
> 
> I'm very eager to see results of an open poll on this topic.
> 
> Best,
> Fabian
> 
> Am 4/6/2021 um 23:29 schrieb Luís Cruz-Filipe:
>> To be honest, when I first started reading this thread I thought it was an 
>> April Fool's joke.
>> On the topic of the logo, I belong to the club of those that can't see 
>> anything but a rooster, even after being told that it looks like something 
>> else. I never even questioned that the logo could be anything else.
>> As for changing the name of Coq to something else, I also find it hard to 
>> digest. It is more than a bit disturbing that the name of a program that 
>> is developed in France should be changed because of how it sounds in 
>> English. Would we be having this conversation if people from France 
>> complained that the name of an American software sounds offensive in 
>> French?
>> .Cheers,
>> Luís
>> On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 9:59 PM Kevin Sullivan <sullivan.kevinj AT gmail.com 
>> <mailto:sullivan.kevinj AT gmail.com>> wrote:
>>    Another data point: I for one am very uncomfortable every time I
>>    have to pronounce the name of the system in front of a class of
>>    undergraduate young men and women, or even graduate students. There
>>    can be no question that it makes many people uncomfortable enough to
>>    be harmful. We're now in a world in which we're working hard to
>>    improve diversity and the inclusion of historically
>>    under-represented groups in our field *because it makes our field
>>    stronger*. We *really, really, really* should find a way to avoid
>>    having to repeat what too many people hear as an offensive juvenile
>>    male sex joke as part of our professional activites.  It's past time
>>    to change the name. "Coke" never really caught on. If the muses
>>    speak to me, I'll add a suggestion or two to the Wiki page. I
>>    understand and can laugh at the humor with the best of them, but
>>    there's a place for that kind of humor, and really the classroom
>>    isn't it.
>>    On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 3:30 PM Talia Ringer
>>    <tringer AT cs.washington.edu <mailto:tringer AT cs.washington.edu>> wrote:
>>        My favorite suggestions in the wiki are the ones that include
>>        Coq as a substring, so that you can keep referring to it as Coq
>>        in French, and just elaborate in English.
>>        Also, I'm really happy to see so many suggestions and so much
>>        constructive feedback in the Wiki! I would expect this community
>>        to be constructive ;)
>>        On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 11:45 AM Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias
>>        <e AT x80.org <mailto:e AT x80.org>> wrote:
>>            Andrew Appel <appel AT princeton.edu
>>            <mailto:appel AT princeton.edu>> writes:
>>             > So I propose a solution for discussion: keep the name Coq
>>            and explain
>>             > that the correct pronunciation in English of the tool
>>            name is "Coke"
>>             > (and this pronunciation has nothing to do with the
>>            pronunciation of
>>             > coq in French or cock in English). But for this solution
>>            to work, the
>>             > whole (anglophone) community has to adopt it.
>>            Indeed, at the very least the Coq team should officially
>>            recommend to
>>            pronounce "Coq" as "coke" in English; this is a solution not
>>            exempt of
>>            flaws, but it seems to me that it is the only-short term viable
>>            workaround for now.
>>            I will make the point on the next Coq dev meeting.
>>            My impression is that the Coq team would be happy to
>>            consider a name
>>            change would a good replacement come up, there is indeed
>>            great concern
>>            w.r.t. the side-effects of the current name.
>>            We don't get reminded often of it tho, I'd say mainly due to
>>            two reasons:
>>            - IAANM, there is not native English speaker in the Coq team
>>            - Research and work in France happens mostly in French, and
>>            it turns out
>>               that "Coq" is a superb name in French! It is easily
>>            associated to
>>               "national pride", which really helps (subconsciously) in
>>            national
>>               funding contexts for example.
>>            Brainstorming a bit, a possibility to try to keep the best
>>            of both
>>            worlds is to keep "The Coq Project" as the official name of
>>            the project,
>>            however name the particular implementation distributed by
>>            the project in
>>            a different way.
>>            Kind regards,
>>            E.