In the lists of words that I’ve blogged so far I’ve leaned quite heavily on archaic words that have fallen out of usage. Many such words refer to specialisms or specialist areas of activity that died out long ago.  If we want to see how such words come into existence – eventually to fade from usage – then all we need to do is take a look at an area of specialism that is currently generating neologisms (new words) at a dramatic rate. Naturally I choose IT and the Internet. Here’s a list of 10 words that are almost certainly destined for obscurity…

1. Cancelmoose: I am a cancelmoose and I probably always will be – but only on a personal level. Ever since freemail services started up I’ve managed several email accounts and now I have six, if you exclude a couple of derelict Yahoo mail accounts that I haven’t used in years. I don’t really care which of these email addresses anyone uses and I am resigned to the fact that at some point in time each email address will get onto a spammers list. Even if I don’t provoke it, by registering on some unscrupulous web site, it will happen because someone with my address on their computer will get a virus that steals their email list and generously shares it.
   However, I use Mac mail, which has a really good rules definition capability and a good spam filter. As a result most of the spam is dropped into a junk folder, where it lives for 7 days before it gets automatically deleted. I have set a rule that diverts all email from people in my address book to a special in-box and thus I get 3 kinds of mail: legitimate, questionable and junk. That’s my cancelmoose strategy. A cancelmoose is someone who wages war against spamming.
2. Teergrube: If you’re a truly dedicated cancelmoose, then you’ll want to set up a teergrube. Teergrube is a German word that literally means tar pit. However the name is metaphorical, because a teergrube is a tar pit for spam and other malevolent email attachments such as worms. It doesn’t stop all such traffic, but it does slow it down dramatically. Teergrubes differ on how they work, but they normally whitelist known good sources of email and blacklist known sources of spam causing them to be delayed indefinitely or deleted. The rest can be analyzed before being let through.
3. Ohnosecond: An ohnosecond is a fraction of a second – in the region of one tenth of a second. That’s the time it takes for someone to realize that they’ve just goofed by doing something on a computer, such as forgetting the attachment for an email or sending an email to the wrong John Smith. The computer, being as dumb as a dog, has no idea that you’ve just goofed and happily sends the email out without you having any means of intervention. The word ohnosecond was invented by Elizabeth Crowe in her book The Electronic Traveler and sadly it is almost certainly destined for extinction, because Google has now added an “Undo Send” feature to its heavily used email service. Google holds every email back for 5 seconds and will cancel if you hit the “Undo Send” button. The ohnosecond, I fear, is no longer a fraction of a second.
4. Googleganger: Egosurfing is the term often used to describe the act of googling for your own name. If, like me, you have a really uncommon name, then the results of an egosurf will return you references only to you. There will be no googlegangers in the mix. However, if I just surf on my surname, then the results are awash with googlegangers. A googleganger is someone that has the same name as you. Google, with its very limited grasp of semantics, is not smart enough to distinguish between the two of you, even if one of you happens to be guilty of numerous crime against humanity. What could be worse than having a truly despicable googleganger?
   Googleganger isn’t the only word Google has given rise to, there is also GoogleWhacking, a game that involves putting a word combination into Google in order to find a combination that gives just one search results. Successful GoogleWhacks are difficult to pull off unless, like me, you run a blog site and therefore decide to put up a GoogleWhack page. I did this several years ago by Googling “Alien sex pills”, discovering that Google gave me no results on that search and then writing this post: Alien sex pills.
5. Cyberchondria: This is another surfing term, referring to hypochondria caused by surfing to medical sites that give descriptions of the symptoms of given illnesses. If you’re a doctor and one of your patients insists that he or she is suffering from pneumonic plague or blackwater fever, in all probability they are only suffering from cyberchondria.
6. Friendorphobia: A cyberchondriac might well suffer from friendorphobia, but not necessarily as a result of cyberchondria. I think most of us suffer from friendorphobia nowadays. Friendorphobia is the fear of forgetting a password. By the way, I am not making this up – there is such a word.
7. Mobisode: When I first saw this word I simply couldn’t work out what it meant. I guess I wasn’t thinking in the right way. It is simply a compression of two words; mobile and episode. It refers to an episode of a broadcast television program that has been converted for viewing on a mobile device, such as an iPhone. The word was invented by the media industry rather than by geeks.
8. Advermation: I personally believe that the Internet will eventually include a much greater amount of advermation than it does now. And it will be a good thing. Internet advertising is often very intrusive and I would personally prefer to choose to read  advertorial pieces than have flash animations dancing all over the screen. Advermation is, sadly,  just another word for advertorial and, as such, it doesn’t deserve to exist as a word. Neither does infotisement, which also means advertorial. I have no idea why these two words have emerged when advertorial is not exactly an obscure word.
9. Crowdsourcing: There are a whole series of words that have been invented to describe relatively new approaches to employment. Crowdsourcing is one such word. It refers to the situation where a task normally assigned to a member of staff or a contractor is outsourced to a poorly defined crowd of people. Open source developments are crowdsourcing of a kind. There are also mash up sites like ProgrammableWeb.com, where companies can post competitions where the winner gets a prize for a program that carries out a specific function. Other employment words worthy of note are: permalancer (a freelancer that hangs around forever), homeshoring (giving work to people who contract to work from home – thus cutting office costs), cyberagents (people who are willing to work on a homeshore basis), presenteeism (working longer hours and skipping holidays in order to try to preserve your job) decruitment (what happens to you if your presenteeist efforts fail to impress.)
10. Bozon: This is a nerd word; some people are accused of having a high bozon count.  A bozon is the smallest possible quantity of stupidity that can exist independently of a body of stupidity. Some physicists take an atomic view of this, maintaining that a bozon is atom-sized and that if sufficient quantities of bozon are accumulated, critical mass will be achieved and something truly dumb will happen. However, other physicists argue that a bozon is a subatomic particle and if it collides at sufficient speed with other atoms that contain bozons, a bozon chain reaction will occur and something truly dumb will happen. It doesn’t matter which theory you adhere to, neither side of the argument has yet managed to inhibit the natural behavior of bozons.

Also:

10 Curse Words You Don’t Know
10 Insulting Words You Don’t Know
10 Nonsense Words You Don’t Know
10 Words You Don’t Know With Limericks
10 Units of Measure You Don’t Know

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