The company has an account on Bilibili[0], where its Chinese name is specified as 鲸鲮. 鲸, romanised as Jing, means "whales" (the animal). So JingOS would be "WhaleOS".
(鲮, romanised as Ling, is another water animal known as "mud carp".)
I did know what jingoism is, but only barely, and mostly from history lessons and didn't think about it at all looking at the OS name.
I agree that is still used, but arguably in very specialized contexts, and has many better and less idiomatic alternatives that make it a poor choice in many publication, helping it become rarer.
I expect a lot of concept names not directly bound to the concept itself to slowly disappear, the same way calling dinnerware "china" won't stand for a lot more generations I think.
Obviously "pretty common" is, just like "obscure", completely subjective. I consider it obscure, but all I can say from looking it up is that at least according to Google Ngram, it's about 1/10 as common as "patriotism", which is saying something as that's been a declining word for a century. It's less common than "chauvinism", "sectarianism" and "xenophobia". In fact, tripling the popularity of "jingoism" still wouldn't make it as popular as any of those. It also peaked in the early 1900s and has since been on a low plateu, which again, I consider a marker of obscurity.
To me the fact that Ngram shows the word “patriotism” on the decline throws doubt on using it for any measure like this. Within the US “patriotism” is used very commonly. It leads me to wonder whether Ngram leans too heavily on scientific or academic literature and not on the words that people actually use in everyday conversation.
Does Ngram scan social media, TV or (to a lesser extent) newspapers? If not I’m dubious about the utility here.
Unless there's a Google Ngram distinct from the Google Books Ngram Viewer https://books.google.com/ngrams/ , their statistics are entirely based on material available in Google Books, which might include some newspapers, but probably not social media or TV.
I'm a Brit, pushing 40. I'm educated to degree level (1st class, FWIW), and very well read (including the venerable Pratchett, though I don't think I have read Jingo yet).
I think I heard the word "jingoism" for the first time ever around 5 years ago. It is not a word one hears very often, and it certainly didn't come to mind from "JingOS".
If you often read high-brow political publications you may come across "jingoism" on the daily, but that is obviously not a huge cross-section of the public.
TBH, kind of bizarre how strongly this jingoism thing is being pushed in this thread.
I have used English as my daily working language in software development for over 20 years and had never heard it before.
Well, we don't discuss a lot of politics in international teams, that's a taboo topic especially when working with Chinese colleagues. And for Trump we have only one word, that I don't want to repeat here.
> I highly doubt they named it after some obscure English expression.
It's not that obscure if a nonnative speaker's first reaction is to think "why would anyone want to call a distro by that name"?
It doesn't matter that there is a perfectly reasonable alternative motivation for it ... It's just, you'll never find me wanting to be heard saying "I think you should use jingos!"[1]
Interestingly, it turns out, someone else thought it would be a good brand name too.[2] So you are not alone.
It's odd though how names just stick. IPad is the ugliest of names and so are most of the other IPrefixed names. I get some of these choices were to break from dictionary words, but I find them vile! In my mind I placate by saying info-pad.
My initial allergy does fade over time. That's advertising/normalisation for you.
It's still staggeringly elitist and unaware to assume that "genuinely" literate people (whatever that means) should not only know of Pratchett but also know his entire bibliography by heart. While it may come to a shock for English speakers from the UK and the US, not everyone that speaks English are American or British, and may not be primarily interested in literature from those countries.
Genuinely literate people mostly know Pratchett, it's a extremely well known author consistently topping charts whose books are available in nearly every language of the world, very popular in Russia as well as Finland as well as Czechia and elsewhere. It shocks me (a Czech person) you'd claim otherwise, some of his books are actually required reading here - we read foreign literature just as much as local. It never struck me as elitist, this is pure merit - you're making it about nations but it's just about Pratchett being that good.
Looked up that book on two different online stores in Sweden cdon and bokus. On both of them the book had zero reviews. Are swedish people not literate?
I am very sure Pratchett is well known even in Sweden. What are the reviews for Romeo and Juliet? And again - not knowing Pratchett doesn't say that one isn't literate. The statement is "most genuinely literate people will know Pratchett". Stop being so defensive for nothing, nobody is attacking your intellect here...
You're turning my statement around and perceive it as if I was suggesting Swedish people are not literate. That's not what I'm saying yet you're defending the Swedes.
It's clearly <Jing><Os>, and Jing sounds like something which is likely a Mandarin (or other Asian language) word.
And Os is a widely accepted name suffix for operating system.
Additionally Jingoism, isn't really that commonly used. Most non-native speaker which are not reading certain political news outlets likely have never heard about this word before (like me). It's definitely not part of the vocabulary thought in (non native) english school courses.
Lastly, where would we end up if we have negative sentiment, every time a wrongly pronounced word happened to sound similar to a word in another language which has negative sentiment attached with it. At that point we probably would need to remove a non small part of names and the english language because wrongly pronouncing it makes it sound like a bad word in some other language...
Their about page[1] says the jing in their company name (Jingling) is 鲸, meaning whale. I don't know if that extends to the OS name as well. (They use "JingOS" even in Chinese prose.)
It probably should and given the branding I thing it makes sense to not mix Hanzi and Latin Characters.
It's just that there is:
- Jing = 鲸
- Jing as simpl. of jīng = 精
- Jing as simpl. of jīng = 經
- ...?
I wouldn't be surprised if they did consider this similar words when creating JingOs as JingOs is the essence (精) which becomes the structure they wave their ecosystem and as such success around (like Warp~經 is for weaving fabrics).
Or this is just a nice coincidence ;=)
But either way interpreting <Jing><Os> as a call out to <jingo><-ism> is very far fetched.
It's not that simple, depending on the Mandarin writing it can also refer to "essence" and probably some other things.
It's appearing in traditional Chinese medicine and seems to be a fairly important concept there.
It also seems to be used as a name.
So Jing is a fairly wide spread well known mandarin word but a Jing + OS + wrong pronoun-cation sounds similar to a not that widely known english word which seems to have gone out of fashion quite a while ago...
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism