Although this year, “vape” was named word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary, the hybrid noun “cyberespionage” was in the running. The British website The Adobo Chronicles stated the obvious: ”Cyberespionage came about as a result of recently-revealed practices by the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA) to spy on phone conversations and Internet communications among governments and private citizens.”
Breaking the word down, “cyber” immediately brings to mind computers. The term is actually short for “cybernetics,” a scientific principle defined in the mid 20th century by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), a professor at MIT. In his book Cybernetics, Wiener defined the term as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Cybernetics comes from the Greek meaning to “steer” or “navigate.”
The study of cybernetics is broad and far reaching. To quote Wikipedia, “Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s . . . . During the second half of the 20th century cybernetics evolved in ways that distinguish first-order cybernetics (about observed systems) from second-order cybernetics (about observing systems). More recently there is talk about a third-order cybernetics (doing in ways that embraces first and second-order).”
“Espionage” is all about observing – and secretly at that. Merriam-Webster defines the word like this: “the things that are done to find out secrets from enemies or competitors the activity of spying.” And computers are great at finding things out, as these stories attest
And, of course, there’s more – and will be more. The Word of the Year doesn’t have to be new, like “vape,” it just has to appear a lot in our lives.
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