Naming to avoid

I’m try­ing to come up with a name for a sub­do­main for a web­site that will be used by our clients to admin­is­ter the orders that come in for their com­pa­nies. Since my com­pa­ny is all about San Fran­cis­co tourism, I like to name the servers for SF streets or oth­er SF triv­ia.… both is best. For exam­ple, our mailserv­er is geary, named for Geary Boule­vard which was itself named for John White Geary, the first Post­mas­ter of San Francisco.

Since this sub­do­main will be used for con­trol and admin­is­tra­tion, and will be vis­i­ble to our cus­tomers, I want­ed to go with some­thing a lit­tle more self-evi­dent, and some­thing that describes the role. Like man­ag­er. I was think­ing about call­ing it may­or, or war­den (for alca­traz) and then flashed on a bril­liant idea: alcalde!

I went to the dic­tio­nary to get the spelling right, and there was all the ety­mo­log­i­cal data about how the word comes from the Span­ish, and orig­i­nal­ly from Ara­bic. Curi­ous. Appar­ent­ly it’s a deriv­a­tive of “al‑q[=a][=i]d” (beats me), the Ara­bic word for a mil­i­tary base, which was trans­formed to the keep­er or com­man­der of the base. So dark humor aside, I think it would be a bad move to name our cus­tomer tools “al-Qae­da”.

So now I’m think­ing “super­vi­sor” is a good serv­er name.