NETYMOLOGY From Apps to Zombies: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World

Tom Chatfield

Quercus Contents

Introduction 1

1. Computers 7 2. Signs of our times 10 5. Marking up 13 4. The burning power of a name 16 5. Myths and monsters 19 6. Speak, memory 22 7. Why wiki? 25 8. Buffed-up gamers 27 9. Very, very big and very, very small 30 10. The names of domains 33 11. Rise of the robots 36 12. Cyber-everything 39 13. Three-letter words 42 14. Everyone's an 45 15. On memes 48 16. Hacking through the net 51 17. Do you grok it? 54 18. Sock puppets and astroturf 57 19. Bluetooth 60 20. The Cupertino effect 63 21. The Scunthorpe problem 66 22. The coming of the geeks 69 23. Beware of the troll 72 24. Bitten by bugs 75 25. Bits, bytes and other delights 78 26. Twinks, twinked and 81 27. Talking less about trees 84 28. ZOMGs, LOLZ 87 29. Happy pew pew to you 90 30. Lifehacking 93 31. The multitasking illusion 96 32. The Streisand effect 99 33. Acute cyberchondria 102 34. Casting the media net 105 35. Bionic beings and better 108 36. Technological black holes 111 37. Google and very big numbers 114 38. Status anxiety 117 39. The zombie computing apocalypse 120 40. To pwn and be pwned 123 41. Learning to speak I33t 125 42. Emoticons 128 43. Getting cyber-sexy 131 44. Slacktivism and the pajamahadeen 134 45. Gamification and the art of persuasion 136 46. Sousveillance 139 47. Phishing, phreaking and phriends 142 48. Spamming for victory 145 49. Gurus and evangelists 148 50. GamelCase 151 51. The Blogosphere and Twitterverse 154 52. Phat and in-game 157 53. Meta- 160 54. TL;DR 163 55. Apps 166 56. Fanboys and girls 169 57. Welcome to the Guild 172 58. Facepalms and *acting out* 175 59. Finding work as a mechanical Turk 178 60. Geocaching 181 61. The beasts of Baidu 184 62. Snowclones 187 63. Typosquatting 190 64. Egosurfing and Googlegangers 193 65. Infovores, digerati and hikikomori 195 66. Planking, owling and horsemanning 198 67. Unfriend, unfavourite (and friends) 201 68. Sneakernets and meatspace 204 69. Going viral 207 70. Dyson spheres and digital dreams 210 71. Welcome to teh interwebs 213 72. On good authority 216 73. A world of hardware 219 74. Darknets, mysterious onions and bitcoins 222 75. Nets, webs and capital letters 225 76. Praying to Isidore and tweeting the Pope 228 77. QWERTY and Dvorak 231 78. Apples are the only fruit 234 79. Eponymous branding 237 80. Mice, mouses and grafacons 240 81. Meh 243 82. Learn Olbanian! 245 83. Booting and rebooting 248 84. Cookie monsters 250 85. Going digitally native 253 86. Netiquette and netizens 256 87. The names of the games 259 88. Flash crowds, mobs, and the slashdot effect 262 89. Godwin's law 265 90. From Beta to Alpha to Golden Master 268 91. Mothers and daughters, masters and slaves 271 92. Bit rot 274 93. Non-printing characters 277 94. Wise web wizards 279 95. Disk drives 282 96. Easter eggs 285 97. Microsoft family names 288 98. Why digital? 291 99. Filing away our data 294 100. Artificial Intelligence and Turing tests 297 ... and finally 300

Acknowledgements 302 Select bibliography and further reading 304 Notes and references 307