Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

You're barking up my tree because I work in the IT field. First, as the article just hints at, there is often rhyme and reason to the seemingly silly naming conventions one will find in IT. They convey useful information to those who maintain the systems, and moreover they do so in a way that breaks down all the complex associations into easily recognized and remembered patterns. If you think about it, if you have to devise a useful naming convention for an extensive array of interrelated components, it helps to get a little creative because human memory works better with more tangible and familiar patterns. This is true even on smaller, more simple scales. Take, for example, the naming of company conference rooms. Let's say a company has four conference rooms in one office. They could name them One through Four, or A through D, but they almost always don't. Often they are given names. People seem to have an easier time organizing objects when they have non-abstract names.   

Second, and this is just a guess, I think that IT folks enjoy bestowing creative names on the subjects in their kingdom as a sort of rebellion against the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hard-to-remember and abstract acronyms and terms (IT jargon) they must memorize. In all of my IT-related classes it was a running joke to see what new horrible acronyms and terms each chapter would throw at us. Some of the mnemonics were just as bad! (Which reminds me of the joke about devising a mnemonic for the spelling of the word mnemonic) Anyway, compared to IT jargon, remembering the names for the nations of Africa is a piece of cake.  

I know a technical writing groups whose servers are noun, verb, comma, and colon. And there was a server at the Dept. of Agriculture named pestilence!

So everyone doesn't name them after characters from Doctor Who or Red Dwarf?  How odd.