An awkward thing about programming in Python: there are lots of double underscores. For example, the standard method names beneath the syntactic sugar have names like __getattr__, constructors are __init__, built-in operators can be overloaded with __add__, and so on. In the Django framework (at least before they integrated the magic-removal branch), the object-relational mapper used keyword arguments named things like user__id__exact.

My problem with the double underscore is that it’s hard to say. How do you pronounce __init__? “underscore underscore init underscore underscore”? “under under init under under”? Just plain “init” seems to leave out something important.

I have a solution: double underscore should be pronounced “dunder”. So __init__ is “dunder init dunder”, or just “dunder init”.

I’ll leave it to someone else to decide what “dunderhead” means now.