Hoop Move Names

But making money teaching IS commodification, and I think that using others' highly specific insights without regard for the source is disrespectful as well as a form of stealing.

However, obviously if you arrived at an insight independently, which I know that you have, there is no conflict with teaching said insight as you understand it.

Where the slippery slope comes in is when someone pirates others' ideas indiscriminately for monetary gain, which is the real expression of the greed you reference. Trademarking and copyrighting are about protecting yourself from such piracy.

I understand why names would be trademarked. It makes sense as far as curriculums go. However, I totally agree with you about moves belonging to everyone. I can't imagine the strife that would ripple through the community if trademarking the actual movements ecame the norm.

hee hee. I'm not surprised to see this discussion happening, I think every skill-toy community has had it in some way, with varying levels of intensity. This *has* happened in the poi world...I remember rather lengthy discussions on Home of Poi about different types of tangles, and differentiating hyperloops versus airwraps...and are they "compound circles" or are they "flowers" and on and on. I don't really keep up on new developments in poi anymore, but I have been spinning poi for twice as long as I've been hooping and even in my short time being "on the scene" I've seen this conversation come up with poi, and staff (I don't staff but staffers are always around) and contact juggling. It's probably happened with yo-yo and other skill-toys too.

Much of what's considered "modern poi" (as opposed to the traditional Maori practice) was actually derived from the circus discipline of club-swinging. Many poi moves are direct translations across props and kept the club-swinging terms -- waist-wraps and fountains being two that come to mind immediately. And also the concept of "beats". There has also been some cross-over from glowstringing -- spiral wraps being a prime example of a poi move that came from that world and kept the name. So much of the nomenclature came from the traditions and movements from which it was derived...a lot of the newer stuff that's being developed now (from my outside perspective) seems to be named purely descriptively with a quasi-scientific/physics oriented flare. Sometimes the person who came up with it calls it something and it sticks, but in other cases the person who first explored the technique and called it one thing (Nick and compound circles) saw the community almost en masse take up another term (flowers).

While I do see the usefulness and even need for those who have developed their own curricula to come up with their own naming, for the sake of an open-source community-based (as opposed to market based) nomenclature, names that are pretty much straight-up descriptions of what's going on seem to work best. Sometimes a more poetic name still describes the move -- to stick with poi analogies, butterflies and flowers are good examples of those.

From what I've seen in the poi world, when it comes to naming, it's the geekiest of the geeks that tend to settle it. ;p Standardization really does benefit everyone and helps us talk to each other. I have every confidence the hoop community will settle into common terms... we're just at that stage of our growth is all.