canada ยท post 07 of 7 in this channel
Where the name We The North comes from
The phrase is not original to the market. It is a piece of Canadian sports vocabulary that was already well known.
the three wethenorth market addresses
hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onionhn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onionhn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onionprinted the way they were handed over. no labels, no numbering, nothing here says which one to try first. this feed never opens them, so it has no status light, no percentage and no date of checking to give you.
the phrase itself
We The North is a Canadian basketball slogan, associated with the national team in that sport, and it has been in wide circulation for years.
It is the kind of phrase that means north as an identity rather than north as a direction, which is why it works as a name for something aimed at one country.
why a market would take it
It says the whole positioning in three words. Anyone from the country recognises it instantly, and anyone else can guess what it is signalling.
That is efficient naming. It also costs nothing, since a slogan cannot be reserved in the way a domain can.
what the borrowing does not imply
No connection to the sport, the team, or anything associated with the phrase. Borrowing a well known name is not a relationship with whoever made it well known.
That sounds obvious written down and it is worth writing down, because familiar names are reassuring in a way that has nothing to do with their source.
why the abbreviation matters
People shorten it to WTN almost immediately, and that is what gets typed into search boxes. Both forms are in use constantly and they refer to the same thing.
This feed uses both for that reason. Somebody searching wtn market and somebody searching wethenorth market are looking for the same set of three addresses.
the naming trap
A recognisable name is easy to imitate. Anything can be called a WeTheNorth mirror, and the name on a page is the cheapest part of it to write.
So a familiar name is not evidence of anything. What matters is the address, which is the subject of the addresses channel.
the small honest observation
Choosing a national slogan rather than an invented word says something about the intended audience, in the same mild way the bilingual interface does.
It is a signal about who the market is for. It is not a signal about anything else, and this channel keeps having to say that.
There is one small practical consequence of the two names, which is worth knowing if you go looking for anything. Searches for the two forms return quite different sets of pages, because different sites optimised for different phrasings.
That means neither search gives you a complete picture, and it means agreement between results is weaker than it looks when the two sets barely overlap.
None of which changes the advice in asking a search engine, which is to have the addresses already and not be searching at all.
A name is the easiest thing in the world to put on a page, and it is the first thing anyone imitating something copies. Treat a familiar name as decoration and the address as the content.
replies
a reader askedIs the market connected to the sports team?
the answerNo. It borrowed a well known phrase. There is no relationship implied by a name and none should be read into one.
a reader askedWhich should I search for, WTN or WeTheNorth?
the answerBoth are used and both refer to the same thing. Searching is itself a habit worth examining, which is the subject of asking a search engine.
a reader askedDo the onion addresses contain the name?
the answerOne of the three has the letters wtn appearing inside it, which is a coincidence of how the string came out rather than a designed feature. The prefix all three share is the deliberate part, and that is in the shared prefix.
what this post is not Not a history of the phrase or of the market. It goes as far as explaining why two names refer to one thing and stops.