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Comment by neiljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Glad you like it, the original idea was to think of Riot in terms of a 'Riot of Colour', though in practice it can be interpreted in lots of different ways.

We think Element has much broader appeal and really like the association with being the smallest indivisible unit.

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I've honestly never heard it used that way. I have no idea what that means. Is it a British thing? I've only ever heard it used one way.

British here, I've definitely heard it used that way but it's not the first thing that comes to mind.

American here. It's not just a British thing, but it's definitely not a very common use of the word.

I think "riot of color," however, is just one instance of a particular, positive use of the word "riot." More broadly, "riot" can mean something like "a really fun thing" (as in "Let's hang out with that guy, he's a riot!"). But I'm not surprised that Element/Riot found that this was not the primary association that folks were making.

In the previous post comments there was an interesting debate on the etymology of the word riot. It's a French borrow in the Middle English era, so its etymology is at best "complicated". The "riot of color" idiom was one of the first written usages in English indeed predating the use of the term for violence, but the French word was "debate/quarrel" so it's hard to rule out that violence or negative connotations weren't always hand in hand in the metaphor underlying "riot of color".

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/riot+of+colours

Still doesn't make any sense ...

I'm just now understanding that moving away from the name Riot was to distance it from recent US riots in mental space.

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