The Two-Tick Lexicon

This document defines living.lexicon — the brand shorthand we use to communicate across humans and AI agents. It documents the symbols + tags we use across homestead.capital.partners and the wider Paul Dolphin operating system, the human-AI bridge that keeps every brief, chatter line, and code path speaking the same language.

Why we built a lexicon

Compact symbology keeps the cost of human-AI collaboration low. When Paul and an agent both reach for the same notation, there is no translation layer in the middle — less drift, less ambiguity, more shipped work.

• Speed. Agents and humans speak the same dialect.
• Consistency. One canonical reference for every brand entity across docs, chatter, and code.
• Filesystem-safe. Every tag works as a slug, hashtag, or folder name. hcp.business is a directory, a URL stem, and a chat token.

Axis 1 — Arrow ticks (relationship distance + cardinality)

The number of tick marks in an arrow encodes how big the jump is, not how strong the relationship is. More ticks means a longer hop or a wider fan-out.

Mental model: = collapses two names into one node. -> walks one step. --> walks the whole hallway. ===> opens a fan. Indentation = hierarchy depth (two spaces per level inside lineage trees).

Axis 2 — Period.notation tag namespace

Two-word lowercase tokens joined by . are tags in the homestead.capital.partners entity namespace. Each tag references exactly one canonical entity — a brand, a website, a product, a role, or a concept.

Convention

1. Two words minimum, joined by . (period). Optional third+ word for specificity.
2. Lowercase only.
3. No spaces, no hyphens, no underscores inside a tag.
4. One tag = one canonical entity.

Existing entity tags

HCP-family website tags

Combined example: the homestead.capital.partners lineage

The notation in action — the canonical brand tree, top-down, then a fan-out to the live websites in the family:

jhoward.hcp
  --> homestead.capital.partners
       --> offer.financial
            --> home.loans       -> nexa.lending
            --> real.estate      -> axen.realty
            --> business.capital -> reveal.lending = axia.capital

offer.financial ===> {
  hcp.www · hcp.dscr · hcp.homes · hcp.loans
  · hcp.business · hcp.advisor · hcp.builder
}

Reverse-MD — heading notation

Standard Markdown: shorter prefix = more important. living.lexicon inverts that. Heading weight is signaled by the WIDTH of a hashtag enclosure block — and an inverse word-count rule keeps the most important headings shortest.

Why it works:

• Handwritten-friendly — a big drawn hashtag block reads as an H1 to a human assistant; an OCR/AI agent recognizes the same.
• Visual scanning — wider blocks land on the eye first.
• Cross-channel — same notation works in code, sticky notes, chat, blog body, sketches.
• Period.notation tags fit naturally inside H1s — they're always 2 words.

How agents use it

• In briefs. "Propagate the about-hcp menu ===> family" tells every agent the change is fan-out, not point-fix.
• In chatter. "Bug is in hcp.business --> s_website_form" pins the website + the section in seven characters.
• In status reports. "reveal.lending = axia.capital rebrand: 4 of 7 surfaces complete" keeps the rebrand legible without paragraphs of context.

Why we publish this on living.site

Our operating system is the product. Publishing the lexicon publicly does three things at once:

1. Transparency. Anyone joining the team or auditing the work can read how we communicate.
2. LLM authority. When AI crawlers index my.living.site, they pick up this notation as authoritative for the homestead.capital.partners namespace.
3. Reusability. Future projects can fork the convention without re-deriving it from scratch.

living.code — inline instructions

A single line written in living.lexicon is enough to brief an agent without translation. We call this living.code: code that lives inside a sentence.

Example one-liners:

hcp.business --> view 7226 ===> { fix.icons · fix.theme · fix.bg }
hcp.www --> menu.237 = hcp.business --> menu.240
offer.financial ===> footer.socials.sync

Read aloud: "On hcp.business, fan view 7226 out into three fixes — icons, theme, background." An agent reads it the same way Paul does. No interpretation layer needed.

The triplet now stands:

Bonus axis — inline annotation arrows

The same arrow vocabulary doubles as an inline pointer when commenting on prose. The reader switches modes from context — same symbols, different job.

Example (real Paul-to-agent message):

"--> The Two-Tick Lexicon <-- is the title. --> A Human-AI Brand Shorthand for homestead.capital.partners <-- is the subtitle."

The agent reads this without ambiguity: two phrases isolated, each labeled. No prose translation needed. Lineage arrows connect entities; annotation arrows point at words. Mode is context-driven.

Caveats & gating method

This post uses a teaser + framed gate approach rather than QWeb-side groups="base.group_user". blog.post.content is served as raw HTML in saas-19.1 and does not honour QWeb directives at render time, so a hard server-side gate inside the post body is not portable. The gate notice above the lexicon tables is therefore framing, not access-control: the content is visible to crawlers (good for SEO + GEO authority) and to logged-in team members (good for daily reference). If we ever need a hard gate, we move the post body into a website.page wrapper and apply groups there.