---
title: "Improper nouns"
date: 2026-02-22
tags: post
---

Myles wrote a great post about [standing up and scaling our nascent recommendation engine](https://mylesmarino.com/drafts/algorithm.html). Buried in the middle is an aside which, as you might suspect, is near and dear to my heart:

> There are effectively seven separate medium vocabularies in our system... Netflix has a taxonomy team of 30 people whose entire job is maintaining genre tags.

Words are tricky and important. Words are weightless and load-bearing.

I wrote about the "newsletter" problem last week in [[how-id-grow-buttondown]]: if you say _newsletters_, it's a very specific word that works for some of your customer cohorts but turns off your business users; if you say _campaigns_, you alienate the prosumer cohort. Yuck!

And this week I was dealing with another such problem, one I have been dealing with for years: _Email_ somehow means both of our most important primitives at once: an email is a broadcast sent out, and an email is also the thing that a subscriber has. At least in this case we can save ourselves a bit of pain and refer to emails in the past tense as _archives_ in some places. But then you run into inconsistency, and users start thinking that an "email" in our parlance is something different than an "archive." [^1]

[^1]: Lest you think this is a theoretical example, I can point you to dozens of actual tickets as exhibits that it is not.

In the codebase about which Myles writes, the core user — an art gallery — is referred to as one of a _platform_, a _widget_, a _gallery_, a _user_, an _admin_, and probably three or four others that I'm forgetting. I have a Sapir-Whorf-esque belief that how you architect code — from big lofty ERDs down to individual variable names — influences how users experience that code. All the more reason that durable abstractions are extremely, extremely important.

And there is no stronger abstraction than a word.