Where did the name “Beehaw” come from? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by Evergreen5970@beehaw.org to c/support@beehaw.org

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I know it’s “Yeehaw” with a bee, but where’d that idea for a name come from?

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[-] TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org 42 points 1 year ago

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".

[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 51 points 1 year ago

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

[-] luciole@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] Limeade@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

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.