Numeronyms are fun, but they have one major problem: namespace collision.
What is a11y? Is it accessibility? Associatively? Axiomatically? Autobiography?
This is obviously a problem that needs solving.
My solution? SHAsum hashing.
We can avoid the ambiguity of "a11y" with this unique, cryptographically sound alternative:
Accessibility? a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y
Axiomatically? a20c4bcee8f977a3f5a3b6b499d52d7dd32584771y
Simple, easy to visually distinguish, everyone wins.
I was actually racking my brain for 'starts with a, ends in y, same length' words to make this dumb joke but then I remembered that /usr/share/dict has _huge_ flat-file lists of words of many languages in it, so I could just get them from that?
Ninety seconds of grep, awk and sort later, there it is. For future reference there's 223 of them, alphabetically going from abdominoscopy to axiomatically.
Y'all these computers have so much in them already. _So much_. But nobody knows.
I joke but a note about language usage and open source _cultural_ accessibility: Numeronyms are bad.
There's no meaningful distinction between "a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y" and "a11y".
Neither is recognizable as "accessibility" to anyone new to the field - great work nerds, we've managed to give the word "accessibility" its very own accessibility problem - and I gotta tell you, "not typing out long words because they're long words" seems childish as hell to most people.
I feel it's perfectly adequate to just take the first two characters of the hash. After all, there could never be a problem with "a88y", right?
You could even start an advice column entitled "Dear A88y"…
Having set out to riff a little on what I took to be the original intent of the post, a jocular suggestion to "cause less confusion" which would instead cause more confusion, I guess I can't complain that OP was in fact confused.
(For the record, my opinion is that the use of "88" by neo-Nazis is one of the more minor reasons to despise them, but it's on the list. I've seen it happen that someone was attacked on-line for having that in their username when it was, as people still sometimes do, their birth year, and I'm sure that kind of dissension is at least part of the intent behind it.)
mhoye
Atomic Fox
cholling
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