Forty chapters, and not one of them is called Farming.
Tractoring, Sheeping, Porking, Cottaging, Council-ing, Counselling, Unfarming, Melting, Harrowing, Frazzling. Forty gerunds, five series, and the plainest word in the language left untouched. That is not an oversight. It is the largest unused word in the system.
Why the word was still available.
The naming system on this programme is a gerund applied to whatever the chapter is actually about, with a joke in it wherever a joke will fit. Cottaging is about a cottage. Council-ing is about the council. Counselling is about therapy and about the council at the same time, which is the best name in the run.
That grammar produces oblique names by construction. It reaches for the funny word, the double meaning, the slightly rude one. It never reaches for the obvious one, because the obvious one is not a joke, and forty chapters of it have left the plainest possible word — the actual name of the actual activity — completely unused.
Which makes it the single most valuable name available in the system, and it should not be spent on a settings page or a newsletter. It should be spent on the largest unbuilt thing, and the largest unbuilt thing is a game.
Every chapter name, and what it did to the word.
| Operation | What it does | Examples | Why Farming is none of them |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain gerund | Names the activity directly | Tractoring, Sheeping, Reaping, Harvesting | These are the closest, and all of them are narrower than the whole activity |
| Double meaning | One word, two readings | Counselling, Cottaging, Melting | Farming has no second meaning, which is exactly the point |
| Register collision | A rude word doing an innocent job | Porking, Cottaging, Fluffing | Nobody would smirk at Farming, and that is a feature here |
| Negation | Naming the absence of the thing | Unfarming | The only chapter that gets near the word, and it takes it away rather than using it |
| Compound invention | A word that did not exist before | Pan-dem-icking, Solo-ing, Council-ing | No invention needed. The word already exists and nobody took it |
| The plain word | The activity, named without a joke | Nothing. Not once, in forty chapters | Which is why it is available |
Three reasons the game gets the word rather than anything else.
-
It is the biggest thing, and the biggest word should go to it.
A settings page named Farming would be an enormous waste. So would a newsletter, a shop category or a landing page. The naming ledger exists precisely to stop good names being spent casually, and this is the best remaining one.
A game is the largest unbuilt thing in this whole document — two to five million pounds at the far end of it, and eighteen to thirty months of work. If any single thing deserves the last plain word, it is that.
The best unused name goes to the biggest unbuilt thing. That is what a ledger is for.
-
The game is the only thing that is actually about farming.
Every other pillar on this site is about a consequence of farming — the shop, the brewery, the pub, the marketplace, the archive. All of them exist because the farming does not pay.
The game is the only one that is about the activity itself: drilling, tending, harvesting, failing, and finding out in August what you got wrong in October. It is the only page family on the site that would be dishonest under any other name.
Everything else here is downstream of farming. Only this is farming.
-
And the plainness is the joke.
After forty chapters of Frazzling, Porking, Fluffing and Pan-dem-icking, the funniest possible name for the next thing is the one that gave up trying. It reads as a straight face at the end of a very long run of gags, which is a considerably better joke than another gag would have been.
It also does the one job a name has to do here, which is to tell somebody what the thing is before they click on it.
The straight face at the end of forty jokes is funnier than a forty-first joke.
Four reasons, in one line each.
Forty chapters
And not one of them called Farming.
Not spent on a utility page
A settings screen has not earned it.
The only thing about the activity
Everything else here is downstream.
The joke is the straight face
After forty of the other kind.
No chapter number is claimed here
The chapter ledger on this site grants numbers deliberately, through a named editor, and nothing auto-publishes. This family does not claim one. It is a design document for something that does not exist, and a number is for a thing that does.
The name, questioned.
Yes. Unfarming, in series three, is the closest anything has come, and it is a negation. The plain word has never been a chapter title.
Because after forty funny ones the straight face is the better joke, and because the name has to tell somebody what the thing is. Farming does both.
No, and it does not claim one. Numbers are granted by a named editor for things that exist. This is a design document for something that does not.
Everything else people ask.
Fourteen questions, including the four that come up first.
