Beehaw Support @beehaw.org Evergreen5970 @beehaw.org 1y ago

Where did the name “Beehaw” come from?

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

23 comments

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".
- 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.
  
  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?
- 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.
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.
spin on Beehive maybe? 🤷‍♂️
From country bumpkin bumblebees
Beehaw! Ride 'em, cowbee!

23 comments