Re: autonomous terminology: WAS: bilax monoidal functors

[Jeff Egger <jeffegger@yahoo.ca>]

Hi Dusko,

> i am reluctant call them dagger star autonomous categories,
> because it is a mouthful.

Perhaps it's a symptom of growing up in a country where
"Kangiqsualujjuaq" is considered a perfectly acceptable
name for a village, but I don't think that "dagger star-
autonomous" is a mouthful.  It's only one syllable longer
than "sesquipedalian", and one less than "linearly
distributive", neither of which I would hesitate to use
in day-to-day conversation, should the occasion arise.

It even scans nicely.

Moreover, it communicates something (at least to me); for
better or worse, both "dagger" and "star-autonomous" are
both established terms, and I can see how they might be
combined.  Agglutination, though often mocked, is often
effective.

> so now, what should we call those "dagger star autonomous
> categories" if
> we don't want to type 30 characters each time we mention
> them?

One of the many curious features of the English language is
that adjectives are never inflected; assuming you use TeX,
why not take advantage of this fact in your source code?
\def\dsa{dagger star-autonomous}

> peter suggests DSA-categories.

If you're publishing in a print journal, or a conference
proceedings with a hard page-limit, then that seems sensible
(though I'd drop the hyphen).  Otherwise, do us all a favour
and stick to the long form: pixels are cheap, as editors of
TAC are wont to say.

> (maybe someone will abbreviate them to D-categories...)

What's the point of that?  D-category could stand for (just
plain old) dagger category, or differential category, or any
number of other things.  But maybe someone some day will
\def\dsa{Pavlovic}.

Cheers,
Jeff.





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