Something Anye (one of the other students in our DDD Immersion course) said last week made a big impression on me:

One of the things I've really got hold of here is naming a pattern. It's hard to define it without having a name for it, or having concrete examples.

I think this is a great insight, and I see this idea applying not only to patterns but also to Ubiquitous Language as well. When we are grappling with a complex domain, a creative collaboration with domain experts in defining that Ubiquitous Language requires a careful attention to language and concrete examples, and perhaps a certain playfulness as well.

Try this fun game with someone today, for example, to see how hard this attentiveness to language can be, and to see the power of changing one word in your speech:

Carry on a whole conversation with someone where you try to never use the word “but” – instead try to phrase it every time so you use the word “and.”  As an additional variation, have the other person try to use “but” as much as possible.

It amazes me how this simple exercise can turn negatives into positives (and vice-versa!). One word can make an amazing difference. Language matters.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. – Abraham Lincoln

What we name a thing matters. How we use words in our daily speech – and especially in our modeling and coding - matters. I am reminded here of a beautiful poem called Words by Dana Gioia:

Words

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

from Interrogations at Noon
© 2001 Dana Gioia

Thanks to my friend Ian Colle for making me aware of this poem last year in our Writing for Publication graduate class.