The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time (34 page)

If an inexperienced prosecutor asks, “Did you kill your husband on March 15 of last year?” and the witness replies, “I didn’t kill him on March 15,” she is trying to be evasive; to the alert, this implies that she killed him on some other date. That denial of a partial qualification of a charge is a
negative pregnant
. It’s a sneaky way of wriggling away from an honest answer, and political observers will be glad to learn its name.

Netenclature.
Let’s say you wanted to set up a Web site containing the complete works of William Shakespeare, or commenting on the use of bawdy language in his plays, or selling your closetfuls of souvenir Shakespeare busts.

What would you name it? How about something simple and direct, like
shakespeare.com
? First you have to see if it has already been taken. Every name has to be registered with the Domain Name System, which translates names into the Internet protocol numbers that route all the computers in the world to a chosen address.

You start by checking with Network Solutions Inc., registrar of more than eight million domain names, or one of its ninety or so rivals that have sprung up since competition was permitted in the past year. You discover that your proposed
shakespeare.com
is already taken by a dreary wordplay gamester and
shakespeare.org
is the site of a nice company of thespians in Lenox, Massachusetts. Also taken are
thebard.org
and
stratford-upon-avon.com
.

Some seeming Shakespearean sites are not Bard-related:
soundfury.com
lays not on
Macbeth
but on music, and
killalllawyers.com
is not an analysis of a slanderous crack by a villain in
Henry VI
but a compilation of lawyer jokes. (Lawyers sensitive to this relentless spoofing find fun being made of other people on
hardyharhar.com
.)

You will find that almost all famous names are already taken by people who were quicker than you. These name claimants either conduct business or educate the world under that domain name, unless they are cybersquat-ters, grabbing the most salable words and well-known names for sale to the highest bidder.

One enterprising outfit, claiming it was merely protecting me from predatory types warehousing names for sale, “owned”
williamsafire.com,
and I had to pay to reclaim my identity. (Few others wanted my name, which was somewhat deflating but lucky for me.) Indeed, some 90 percent of the most common words in English are already claimed by the fast operators of “netenclature,” my unregistered appellation for the Internet-naming business or racket. For details on the way the naming system works, click on
ICANNWatch.org,
a private organization that keeps an eye on the government-sanctioned Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. (A domain name for fed-up television viewers or opponents of voyeurism would be
ICANTwatch,
surely not registered yet.)

What’s in a name? As Shakespeare’s Juliet discovered, plenty. This department’s interest is in the more creative names now dotting the linguistic landscape. Some are thoughtful: a site dealing with general semantics, often illustrating the differentiation of words, is
thisisnotthat.com
. Others compress a readily understandable message into a new compound:
bibliofind.com,
for example, uses the Greek
biblion,
“book,” which bibliophiles know, with the English verb to
find
—you use this Web site to find old books.

Most people who want access to official White House transcripts and pictures of the first family do not use the correct “top domain” (the suffix-like three letters after the dot). Instead of punching in
whitehouse.gov,
which would get them a smiling face of President Clinton, they mistakenly use
whitehouse.com
. This takes them to a site that a pornography distributor shrewdly glommed on to. (It was a commercial trick, not a GOP plot.)

I have not checked this out because I am writing this on a
New York Times
computer at the office and can envision the oh-yeah smirk on the face of systems support when I sputter out an explanation that this search lasting several hours was only in furtherance of my scholarly duty.

But Web criticism, especially self-criticism, is clearly labeled.
Worstoftheweb.com
competes with the more informal
webpagesthatsuck.com
. License-plate messaging has been adopted by domain namers:
Ubid.com
is an auction site;
4800numbers.com
helps you find an 800-number;
uex-press.com
leads you to the free expressions of some columnists.

Some names are registered by groups that want to protect their members from offense. There is a
nigger.com
registered, property of the NAACP, to keep the slur from being used by racists. In the same way, the Anti-Defamation League owns
kike.com,
as well as other top-domain endings. That shows foresight by organizations fighting bigotry. Taking a leaf from their book, political candidates this year have been preempting the names of sites that might be used to embarrass them. Though
buddhisttemple
is taken,
bobjonesu
remains available.

Some names are inexplicable:
amazon.com,
originally a bookseller, has nothing directly to do with the South American river or the legendary tribe of dominatrixes. Jeff Bezos, creator of that successful site, named it after the river because it carries more water than any other. (The Nile, though longer, carries less water.)
Monster.com
is an employment finder, so named for no reason I can ascertain other than that is the way some people characterize bosses.

Many of the best names are those that succinctly describe products. For example,
johnnyglow.com
sells fluorescent adhesive strips to put on the inside of toilet bowls to aid men who can’t find the light switch in the dark. (The slang term
john
is applied to men’s lavatories because it was once the most common male first name. I thought I would name my Web site
tangent.com,
but somebody with a wandering mind already did.)

Names make not only news but also profits; and as Amelia Bloomer and Captain Boycott taught us, names also make words. We will watch the coming Internet battles over trademark and copyrights in its nomenclature, but just as important, we will keep our sticky eyeballs on the creativity that labels the most eminent domains.

I enjoyed your reference to amazon.com. You may know this, but Jeff Bezos had originally decided to name his company cadabra.com (as in
abra cadabra,
it’s magic, I assume) but apparently, when he went to incorporate it, his lawyer pal said it would sound too much like “cadaver.com” and thus turn people off. So he opted for
amazon
instead
.

Sam Verhovek

The New York Times

New York, New York

Netspionage.
E-fraud
solicitor is how Steven Philippsohn, a lawyer in London, describes his line of work. In a recent article in
Communications World,
he used a word that fills a void (once pronounced in Brooklyn as “a woid that fills a verd”): “
Netspionage
is already affecting computer contractors.”

Netspionage
is a blendword. (That is usually written as
blend word,
but in my view, its meaning of “mingling” all but forces the two words together.) It uses the
net
of
Internet
as a prefix, following
Netiquette
(for “Internet eti-quette”),
Netsploitation
movies (which exploit fears of the Internet) and
Netspertise
(which I don’t have).

You’ll see plenty of other blendwords created with the
net
prefix. Forget
cyber,
from Norbert Wiener’s
cybernetics:
that was the last decade’s hot combining form. It’s now almost as outdated in the neologism dodge as the suffixes
-arama
and
-aholic
.

Because
inter-
begins so many words, it is not a popular new combining form.
Internesia
means “inability to remember where on the Web you saw a particular bit of information,” and I presume a lesson plan to overcome this mental lapse is called an
intercourse
.

But let us return to the subject of
Netspionage
. What new words are the real spooks speaking out there in the cold? A cleaning out of the usual dead drops takes us beyond the computer world and
elint
(electronic intelligence) into
humint
—a blendword formed by
human
and
intelligence.

Here’s one I heard rather than read:
skiff,
as in the sentence “Is there a
skiff
where we can talk?” At first, I thought it was a small boat, the word
skiff
derived from the Germanic
schif,
akin to
ship
. But it has nothing to do with naval information; thanks to Thomas Powers, author of
Heisenberg’s
War,
I am informed that it is the sound of an acronym—SCIF—secret compartmented intelligence facility.

“Secret compartmented intelligence,” says Powers, “is a level of classification for a class of intelligence that’s above top secret. A SCIF is a room that has been secured and sealed under very tight regulations, where classified information can be safely discussed, read and handled.”

We used to call that a “clean room.” At Spaso House, our embassy in Moscow, I recall meeting other presidential aides in a soundproof, penetration-proof room built inside another, less secure room, whose walls were suspected to have ears. Now such a room within a room is called a SCIF.

Another relatively new term of the clandestine arts is
perception management.
David Wise, in his book
Cassidy’s Run: The Secret Spy War Over
Nerve Gas,
notes that this phrase means “the manipulation of the perceptions of the target country. But the latest term of art, like its predecessors, boiled down to the same thing—tricking an adversary into believing false information by persuading it that a source, actually under U.S. control, was selling America’s secrets.”

I asked Wise if he had picked up any of the latest spookspeak from Yasenovo, the suburban Moscow headquarters of the KGB. (That agency now calls itself the SVR, but Americans still refer to it with the name by which it came to be known and feared.) Just as the CIA calls itself “the Company,” Wise reports, the KGB now refers to Yasenovo as
Kontora,
“the Office.” Fake passports are called, in Russian, “shoes” because the passport forgers are called “cobblers.” What we call a
dead drop
—often a tree in which secrets are left to be picked up by another agent—is
dubok,
or “little oak.”

Because United States policy frowns on assassinations, the intelligence community needed a phrase to cover the idea of bombing the general area in which an unfriendly dictator or terrorist is likely to be resident. Such attacks are now enshrined in bureaucratese as
regime lethal
.
U.S. News & World Report
spotted the usage regarding Saddam Hussein in November 1998, defining it as “targeting the dictator and the powerful Revolutionary Guard units that keep him in power.”

Ed Epstein, author of
Dossier: The Secret Life ofArmand Hammer,
reports that
mole hunt
now has a pejorative connotation, bottomed as it is on
witch
hunt
. In that regard,
sickthink,
coined on the analogy of
doublethink
and
groupthink,
means “a predisposition to believe one’s own agents are controlled by the other side.”
Sickthink
is usually accompanied by intimations of paranoia and mutterings about counterspies who grow orchids.

Deer park
is defined by Epstein as “a diplomatic area, like the U.N., in which headhunters recruit agents.” (I am informed by the novelist Norman Mailer, who titled a 1955 book about a decadent Hollywood
The Deer
Park,
that he dimly recollects taking that title from a passage in
The Private
Life of Louis XV
in which Mouffle d’Angerville described
le parc aux cerfs
as a wooded area near the court of Versailles where
stags
—male courtiers—would seek out the
does,
courtesans selling sexual favors. Spymasters like such literary conceits.)