There's overreaching first-principles boil-the-ocean dorm room rethinking of concepts, and then there's renaming the ASCII characters.
As I age, I find it harder and harder to remember how easy and natural it is for young people to learn new things: ideas, theories, languages, and yes -- names. Alas, we can't rejuvenate our brains. I know of only one (partial) cure: have your own kids. You'll feel jealous all the time, but it's worth it.
It's painful to admit that I'm probably too old to learn other peoples' new languages. But any new language isn't and can't be designed for 42-year-old silverbacks. It has to be designed for kids -- or at least, people are who are kids now. And believe me, teenagers love this kind of stuff...
[Edit: tptacek, when you edit a comment after posting it, I think it's good etiquette to mark it with an [edit]]?
I'm a parent of two teenagers, neither of whom seems particularly interested in new names for punctuation.
An XS Nock shirt is a dress for my daughter, but she loves the "code." I guess all kids are different. But you never know what they're ready to learn until you try to teach them.
Even more digressing, I'm very curious if young brains have an innate sense of 'new' in the most complex and abstract sense. It's as if they smell it.
As it happens, "green" exists linguistically, so one is not compelled to wax artfully about the "yellow-blue blades [of grass] laced in dew". However, it used to be that the only way to talk of "orange" was as "yellow-red" or similar, until the simplifying convention of a new word for a distinct entity took hold.
Edit: Further, Urbit's equivalent of the Sunflower State Congress plan gloms enough together that an atomistically novel domain specific vocabulary is at least as useful.
Edit: As one effectively lay to the many disciplines of the professional field of computation, I use this forum to advertise my continued interest in a critical audit of Urbit. If Keean Schupke and Thomas Lord can probe the depths of Carl Hewitt's ActorScript [1] (the true standard for any so accused "obscurantist" software), then a fortiori Urbit's Anathem barrier [2] can be only semi-impermeable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board