You may want more than one (comma separated?). Also could have one to get rid of the leading joint (this is all for display, not references). That might still be useful in the //absolute_name syntax later.

I like this idea. Have seen the need for it.

Re nomenclature: don't like "inflect" -- too geeky. Our typical vocabulary for this is name variants, so perhaps we could use either that or just "variant"? "Variant" encompasses more than inflection -- also capitalization, punctuation, and (for CamelCase, at least) spacing. I don't see too much danger of overloading here as long as we allow specifications of multiple kinds of variations in the value.

variant: lowercase plural

variant: camelcase singular

...might even support simple regexp...

Is that a situation where "you may want more than one"? You don't meant wanting more than one name, do you? I would think that would be multiple nests.

Could potentially support tenses for verbs for this, even.

I meant like your examples, lowercase and plural and as with inflecting a string in ruby, order often matters. Name variant is probably better, and I would be happy with the feature whatever the name.

Generally, the idea is you are getting another name that would have the same key, so this logic is at least somewhat dependent on smartname key processing. In views, it can be considered similar to the link text where you are totally changing what is displayed.