What's Pinyination?
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 04:16PM Pinyination - it took me awhile to come up with this, but after a lot of thought, it seems to make perfect sense. It's formed from two words - 'Pinyin' and 'Nation'. Pinyin is a somewhat phonetic interpretation of Chinese language characters, and it used to help people learn how to speak Chinese. It serves as a sort of 'middleware'- bridging two language concepts that don't even come close to mapping. We're all familiar with the word 'nation', but what we don't always realize is that nations don't always have to exist (ie: they can be made up! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation). Put these two concepts together, and maybe you can follow what I'm getting at. Simply put, pinyination is my attempt to identify concepts (primarily technical, but not always!) and make them understandable - to a nation of knowledge seekers and sharers. And it sounds like opinion and imagination mashed together - that wasn't intentional, but it's meaningful.

Reader Comments