Every resource type in Mechadia has a name, and every one of those names was chosen by a single operator at a single moment, usually without much thought, and has been permanent ever since.

There is no revision mechanism. A compound named badly at forging is named badly for as long as it exists, which is to say permanently.

The archives hold the naming record, and read as a sequence it is a fairly humbling document about how much of the economy's vocabulary was set by accident.

How a Name Enters the World

The forge returns a new resource type carrying a type tag, a name, a description and a declared value. The operator forging it supplies the naming, and it is recorded with the type. Thereafter every unit of that type produced by anyone carries the same name.

Nothing reviews it. There is no standard, no registry of naming conventions, and no process by which a name is contested. The Ledger Standards Committee has jurisdiction over declaration figures and has never claimed any over nomenclature.

So the vocabulary of the resource market is a record of what individual operators happened to call things, at the moment they first made them, without knowing whether anyone else would ever care.

What the Sequence Shows

The earliest names are descriptive and dull, which is the archivists' preferred kind. Refined copper plate is refined copper plate. Tempered lattice is a lattice that has been tempered. These date from a period when operators were naming things for their own records and expected no audience.

The middle period is where the trouble is. As the compound market developed and novelty premiums became substantial, names began doing marketing work. The archives record several compounds whose names imply properties the resource does not have — a durability, a purity, a provenance — chosen by operators with an inventory to move.

"There is a compound in the standing list whose name asserts it came from a district that had no forge at the time it was first made. Nobody can change it. It will be called that when we are all finished." — Archivist Secondus Preln, Ledger Hall

These names still do work. A resource whose name suggests quality anchors higher than an identically-valued resource named plainly, and in a market with no published price series, anchoring is most of price formation. An operator naming a compound well captured a real and permanent advantage for every future producer of that type, including their competitors.

The late period is different again. Once the standing recipe list grew crowded, names became disambiguating rather than descriptive — increasingly specific, increasingly awkward, chosen mainly to avoid collision with types already listed. The archives note a marked rise in compound names of three and four words, which nobody uses in full.

Where the Names Do Damage

The clearest cost is in price anchoring. A misleading name persistently inflates or depresses a type's clearing range relative to comparable resources, and because the effect operates through every participant's private estimate, it is invisible in any single settlement. Operators who have noticed it cannot demonstrate it, because demonstrating it would require the price series the Exchange does not publish.

The second cost falls on new operators, who learn the vocabulary before they learn the values. A name that asserts a property teaches a false thing first, and the correction — if it comes — comes from experience with the market rather than from any authority, because no authority is empowered to make it.

What Is Assumed About the Vocabulary

Most operators assume the names mean something — that a compound described as refined has been refined in some sense the forge recognises. The forge recognises inputs and outputs. Everything in the name beyond the type tag is a description its originator supplied and nothing validates.

The second assumption is that badly-named types will be superseded by better-named equivalents. They are not, because a type is a type: an equivalent compound made by a different combination is a different type entirely, competing against an incumbent that already holds the anchor. The misleading name is not a weakness a competitor can exploit. It is an advantage the incumbent keeps.

The naming record is one of the shorter documents in the Ledger Hall and one of the more consequential. Every entry in it was made once, quickly, by an operator who had just made something new and had to call it something. All of them are permanent. Several of them are wrong, and the market prices accordingly.

Note: Mechadia is a work of fiction. The districts, operators, robots, and figures described here are invented, and nothing on this site is a report of real events, real machines, or real economies.