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Charles Gilman wrote on Sun, Apr 22, 2012 06:25 AM UTC:
Since my use of Ibis for the 8:1 leaper began causing consternation I have been thinking about replacing it and suddenly I realised that another waterfowl starts with the same vowel and consonant, though in a different order. I therefore made up my mind to remove the Ibis piece from the one variant using it - Armies of Faith 1, a themed variant, and rename the piece. I have done the first, but as removing the name Ibis would of course make a nonsense of Ibex for the 7:4 leaper I had decided to rename that piece as well to make one big change to Man and Beast 03, and a name for that took longer to devise.

The new name that I had in mind for the 8:1 leaper was Bittern. This would preserve most of the extrapolated names, in particular Birdinal would still have a bird-named oblique component. Those that would change would include simplifications - the exceptional Iris and its compound the Bibshal would give way to the more usual Tibtern and Tibshal.

The 7:4 leaper I still wanted to name after a beast of some kind, to preserve the bird+beast property of the Bat piece, and the square-board beast piece names are ungulate ones. I could not think of any ungulates genuinely starting with Be or Ble of Bre or Eb, so I realised that Bemel and Beau and so on had to change too. In any case, I had an idea for using Be- elsewhere, to replace Ultimatum with Bettong for Man and Beast 05's 8:4:1 leaper. A bettong is a type of marsupial - and therefore would fit in with Dunnart, Bandicoot, and in particular Opossum.

My first thought was Ox, as I had never used that combination of vowel and consonant before. Bemel would become Xomel, but I could not think of any satisfactory replacement for Beau. Then I started looking into words beginning with Lu- or Ul- to do a complete swap with the 8:4:1 leaper. I discovered that there was a breed of cattle called Luing, and thought that I would have to settle for it. It would be a very obscure choice of name for something as useful as a coprime square-board piece. It would alo mean that the switches to pages 03 and 05 of Man and Beast would have to be changed during my same internet session - along with all the other changes.

Then it occurred to me that Ormolu was no better a name for Oddfellow+Dormouse than for a hypothetical Ox+Xomel, and so I looked for a different name for Oddfellow+Dormouse. Evenetually I settled on Dropthru, a reference to how one might "drop through" a hole or a trapdoor or whateer. It was fairly desperate, but it would allow me to keep more options open for when I get round to updating Man and Beast 05. So now I have the choice of Ox or Luing, and am inclined more to the former - but would be interested to hear what others think.

This message is also a test to see whether I can still start my own threads.


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