I am trying to solve a specific problem that has some other applications.
My specific problem is I want to add an English word to every file from my camera. The files come in like [date]_time.jpg. Although I think the best workflow involves using a photo management app like DarkTable, sometimes you just want to quickly browse your filesystem and grab the original image. Browsing just by datetime creates problems when you take two very similar images seconds apart. It takes a lot of effort determining which is which. And if you pick out your best picture from a shoot, you then have to mentally note you want timestamp _12345678 and find it in your folder.
I think it would be smoother to have files like:
20261019_cape_1234567820261019_echo_12346678
In my specific case, 100 unique words is the absolute minimum, with 500-2000 words being more comfortable.
This is trivial if you have a “wordlist”, a list of words you find suitable for the task. And there’s the rub. What’s a good wordlist? I can hack one together myself but I’m hoping some top minds have thought about this.
Some prior art that I’ve found is:
- Diceware and the EFF diceware lists
- Some bitcoin folks created 2048 words that are uniquely identified by the first 4 letters of the word
- a lot of default usernames take the form
adjective-noun, but I don’t know where they get their wordlist - router default passwords
This task is nontrivial in my use case. Words can:
- evoke computers - copy, original, resize, error, fail, process, base, cat, category, data, base, idle, arm
- evoke other common file formats - album, music, song, camera, photo, video
- evoke the contents of an image or file - cool, neat, tree, car, sky, beautiful, best, trip
- evoke common filenames and extensions - wave
- be full on offensive
- be offensive in some contexts, as well as have a negative connotation in the most literal sense: bad, corrupt, awful, awkward, bomb
This is partly an “I know it when I see it” problem, but I’m kind of looking for the 500 blandest, most non-ideological English words there are.
How about using the radio alphabet, and then picking two words each time? Then you’d have some 26^2 combinations, which is hopefully enough.
The good part is that this would take meaning out of the words, because when thinking about it, also words like echo and cape will evoke some emotional connotation inside you. But when treating the words as just another form of cold and objective identifier, like they are used in radio communications, that may take the emotional connotation out of them.