From my memory, folks were hanging out in the discord (the discord came before the website as a group of folks who wanted to start a different kind of community) and were talking about possibilities for the site. Early on there was talk of developing something from scratch (in fact, I think a working prototype was developed before it was decided to pivot to lemmy) and the admins needed something to name the github repo. As I recall somebody stuck their head in and just said the word "beehaw" and it stuck. I could be mixing things up, the timeline is a bit fuzzy and it's possible there were other discussions happening that I wasn't aware of. But as far as I remember it pretty much came out of nowhere and everybody just kinda shrugged and said, "that's the one".
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The person who suggested it just got a beehaw tattoo and loved it. To me, it was instantly clear it checked the following characteristics of good branding or appealing attributes:
- Reasonably unique
- Coherent branding/image
- Open to enough interpretation to inspire ideas
- Cute, short, recognizable
- Bees are awesome and important to the world
- A good level of modern absurdity
- Some kind of je-ne-sais-quoi amalgamation of clear US imagery without being pro-US, inspirational/motivating, action-forward, idk what else to put here but just like, good in the way yahoo is good but from a different cultural background
I think I saw you had commented this on the discord a while back, and I still had not made the connection just now that they had gotten a cowboy bee tattoo before suggesting the name.
They did, yes!
So beehaw was a thing before this website existed, right? I’m not from the US, English is not my first language and I can’t find anything about it on the internet except pictures of bees with cowboy hats. Is it a cute slang from some region? If so, what does it mean? Or just a pun?
Someone deciding to combine the phrase yeehaw with bees to create beehaw and art/iconography to match predates the website, yes. As far as I know, we may be the largest cultural movement associated with the idea/concept.
Wondering if we can have the origin of the name Beehaw as part of the Beehaw documentation. I skimmed the documentation before asking this question and didn’t find it there, which is why I ended up asking here.
Yea we'll see if we can put it somewhere
I'm from Texas and "yeehaw" is a southern slang celebratory exclamation, so it's something people from outside the area kind of expect they might hear out here. It's maybe a bit rural and unsophisticated so you don't really hear it in casual conversation except rarely to be silly, but you see it enough in old movies depicting cowboys that most Americans are likely familiar with the word even though it's not regularly used.
When I heard about this server called beehaw, I thought it was just nonsense syllables. Then I saw the bee in the logo without really noticing the details and thought someone added a nonsense suffix to the word "bee". It wasn't until someone suggested members should be called the yeehive (which looks like hive with a nonsense prefix) and another commenter said they finally understand the server name that I took a closer look and noticed the cowboy hat and realized the name was from combining bee with yeehaw. Bees aren't really associated with cowboys, so it's not very obvious if you aren't looking for it. It's a pretty absurd amalgamation but the drawing of the bee in cowboy gear is adorable.
As soon as I saw whoever that person was that said 'beehaw', I immediately went to Namecheap and purchased 'beehaw.org'.
To add to this, I dug up old stuff and it turns out this was probably because the same person who came up with the name had a few hours prior suggested we use this great bee art for the server icon!
I love it so much. And the crab is their little fren, and they go out riding on the open range together to gather flowers and pollen. Best buds.
and yet the opportunity to have the crab go 'yeeclaw' was missed. I seem to remember seeing a cross stitch of a crab in a cowboy hat saying that before, but still;
where did it come from, where did it go?!
His eyes was his tools and his smile was his gun
But all he had come for was having some fun
What else does one exclaim when running into bees in tiny bespoke cowboy hats?
Maybe it's because I'm not a native English speaker, but I also associate it with "behave" as well, which imo works with the goal of fostering a nice community.
And behave is like beehive!
Good luck sleeping tonight lol.
From country bumpkin bumblebees
Beehaw! Ride 'em, cowbee!
spin on Beehive maybe? 🤷♂️