Reading Manton’s post this morning reminds of one the projects I worked on. It was a Java GUI app called CBL that we would deploy to Windows machines of our customers. It would constantly crash and whenever it did, it was impossible to get the stack-trace. I added a class which would show the stack-trace to the user, so they could copy and paste it to support. I could’ve named it anything but I chose the name “CBLMessageOfDeath”.
It’s not nearly as creative as “vetos” but, much like Manton, it made me smile whenever I had to work with it. And compared to alternative names like “ErrorDialog”, it did a better job of being more interesting and memorable. It’d had to, or I wouldn’t remember it after a decade and a half.