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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Alice and Bob have been used in cryptography discussions for decades. While initially you would just incrementally add new characters in alphabetical order, over time people began deliberately choosing characters' names as a play on words based on their role in the situation being described (e.g. "Eve" or "Yves" are characters who are eavesdropping on a conversation, "Mallory" is a malicious attacker). I view Slutty Sabrina etc. as a logical extension of that principle.

why is this a thing in the first place, to want to give names to these weird fake straw people?

I prefer Alice and Bob framings because when I'm describing a hypothetical scenario with any degree of complexity, failing to name the characters results in clunky, unwieldy prose where it can be difficult to follow which character is which. Compare:

Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, she has an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon her arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.

With:

Supposing someone has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of their car, fully cognisant of the fact that they're too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian is killed. Upon their arrest, the driver defends themself by claiming that, while they did drive drunk of their own volition, they never consented to hitting the pedestrian with their car, so they can't be held responsible for it.

The second example is actually pretty close to what I started writing when I originally wrote that comment, but after awhile even I started getting confused about who the pronoun "they" and its derivatives was referring to. Naming the characters made the situation much clearer. (And this is a scenario with only two characters: with three or more, naming the characters is practically obligatory.)