Many teams have created best practices for how they should name & describe their @apachekafka events. When they do this, a kind of murky categorization emerges, but no one can quite make out where the boundaries are. As it turns out, linguists beat us to it a long time ago. 1/

Courtesy of @sapinker in The Stuff of Thought, linguists break down event-verbs into a set of subtle, yet apt classes. Here are a few of them.

Events can go on indefinitely (like "running around") or culminate in a clear endpoint (like "drawing a circle"). The latter are "telic", and the former "atelic".

Events can also be categorized whether they spread out in time (like "running") or occur effectively instantaneously (like "drawing a circle"). The former are called "durative", the latter "momentaneous".

(What "effectively instantaneously" actually means is itself an interesting foray into human perception. It goes by the term "specious present".)

There's also classes to describe repetition (like "pound a nail") and inception of state (like "sit down"). The former are called "iterative" because they only make sense in multiples, and the latter "inceptive".

What's neat is that all of these classes compose. For example, telic events can be durative or momentaneous.

It's nice finding established words for concepts that we're grasping at.