Jeff Egger <jeffegger@yahoo.ca> wrote, in part,
My objection to the phrase "autonomous category" (which Dusko brought up) has less to do with defending Fred Linton's original usage of that phrase than the fact that "autonomous category" is a special case (and, from one point of view, a rather uninteresting special case) of "star-autonomous category", whereas it sounds like "star-autonomous category" should mean an "autonomous category" with some extra structure. (And, of course, this once was the case, w.r.t. the older terminology.) This is confusing; hence one term or the other should be changed. I am, in fact, open to all suggestions, though I cannot help but prefer that "star-autonomous" be kept and "autonomous" changed.
Without seeking to prolong the use of "autonomous" today, let me just say in my defense that, at the time I brought that term into use, I was thinking it was the sort of place-holder name that would, eventually, be replaced (as it has been) by something more appropriate. This was, as I recall, also the original motivation for the term "exact"; fortunately for its coiners, "exact" worked so well that it never did need to get replaced. "Autonomous," on the other hand, was not nearly as felicitous a choice, and has long since been superceded -- I have no qualms about that, nor any regrets (all the fewer because, as I recall, I was at that time thinking only of symmetric closed monoidal categories V for which the Set-valued Hom functor V(E, -) (E the monoidal unit object) was faithful :-) ). Cheers, -- Fred [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]