Narendra

Whats in a name?

Now every body knows orkutting and it seems the success of this social network have widen the sphere of cyber-space. Though many people know can easily understand this word “Cyber-space” but can anyone recall this word was not in dictionary mere 10 years ago.

You must have heard of Squatting. What about Cybersquatting? It is the illegal activity of buying and officially recording an address on the internet that is the name of an existing company or a well known person, with the intention of selling it to the owner in order to make money. Just like sqatting where a person sits of live in a building or on land which is not his, without the owner’s permission. [As a matter of fact the inbuilt dictionary in the Firefox 2.0 can't recognize this word.]

Not only this but there are many other new words which have been coined to name things related with cyber… and its not that difficult to guess their meaning. For example, You know whatslacking means, then its not difficult to know cyberslacking [again a unrecognized word] – Wasting time on the internet.

What do you call a person who uses internet – its Cybernaut, just like astronaut.

When you scientifically study the communication and control, especially concerned with comparing human and animal brains with electronic devices we term it as Cybernetics. [deriving from the Greek word for steersman (kybernetes),learn more about it here]

Further, I find that craze about the sci-fi movies have increased quite high, remember Matrix trilogy? With what name do we know such stories (imaginary future world controlled by technology and computers). Its such a lovely name- Cyberpunk.

Update: Just during my Jayashree Toastmasters club meeting I learned another word with similar meaning as cyberslacking – its Screansunking – its used when a person surf through a number of pages on internet without knowing the what he is looking for is available on that page or not.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!