Etymolution
Interactive, 2010
Etymolution, noun. Tinkering with English. It’s evolution meets etymology—creating new words, newing existing words, and refixing some of the classics.
1. Tinkering with English.
2. The practice of coining new words, newing existing words, and refixing some of the classics.
Etymology: etymology + evolution—a word that demonstrates itself, which is the only kind worth the trouble.
Status: live since 2010. Open to contribution.
- Role
- Concept & engineering
- Relationship
- Live and maintained continuously since 2010—the longest-running thing the studio operates
- Target
- A public instrument for tinkering with English—coining new words, newing existing ones, and refixing the classics—open to contribution rather than curated from above
- Constraints
- 2010 · self-directed, unfunded · no vendor in the path—a plain site and a public repository, which is why it still runs sixteen years later
- Force fielded
- Nick Charney Kaye—concept and engineering; contributors, via GitHub
- Time-to-dispatch
- Live June 2010; still live today, with the contribution door still open
- Result
- etymolution.com live and browsable, with the source public at github.com/outrightmental/etymolution
- Principal
- Outright Mental (self-directed)
Sixteen years of uptime is the argument
There is nothing clever about the engineering here, and that is precisely the point worth making. Etymolution is a small public instrument with no vendor anywhere in its path—no platform to be deprecated, no service to change its pricing, no dependency whose maintainer could disappear and take the site with them. It is a plain site and a public repository, and it has therefore simply kept working since June 2010 while a great deal of more sophisticated software from that year has gone dark.
That is the studio’s research instrument posture in its earliest and smallest form: build the thing small, publish the source, and let longevity be the feature nobody can fake. The same discipline runs the studio’s current instrument, Indie Game Analysis—sources pinned per claim, browsable with or without JavaScript, built to outlast its own launch.
Contributions are welcome via GitHub. Refixing a classic is harder than coining a new one; the classics have had time to get comfortable.
Small is not a phase. Small is the method—the manifesto, stated as a studio policy and demonstrated here as an operations result. A tiny thing, fully owned, still running. Everything is temporary, but some things are temporary more slowly than others.
Proof: etymolution.com—live since 2010 · source on GitHub.
