Looking over 1.9's change of #send, ie. send doesn't always call private methods anymore (#__send, #__send!, #funcall) ruby-talk:153672 It is still possible to call them with the newly introduced #__send! and funcall methods. Can I make a modest proposal? Can we preserve backward compatibility, keeping #send as is, and instead pick a new name for the "proper" public send? I think it would be much better to keep backward compatibity rather than stress over exact terms ( yes, I'm learning to make the tough choices ;-) There doesn't seem any good reason to change how #send works if we are just going to have the same functionality in another ordinary method, ie. #funcall. As for a name for the new method, I know #call won't do b/c of Proc, unless we want to make an exception for Proc and Proc-like objects -- which seems a viable option. But I'm sure their are other good choices too. T.