At 03:35 AM 10/31/03 -0800, you wrote:
What about "zog?" It's short and not already taken, so not ambiguous. It's also easy to spell!
You probably don't want to know that ZOG is an acronym used by antisemitic conspiracy theorists; it stands for Zionist Occupied Government, and refers to the theory that at some point in the past there was a Bad Event and ever since then the USA has been secretly run by Jews.
(Another possibility would be "zop.")
As far as I know, "zop" is not so embarrassingly taken already. I was also thinking maybe we could use "count" as a noun. That is, 0 is a count, 1 is a count, but -1 isn't a count. "Tale" is also possible etymologically, since "tell" used to be synonymous with "count"; near the beginning of Hamlet some character explains that the ghost hung around "while one with moderate haste might tell a hundred". I rather like the idea that every nonnegative integer is a "tale". -A