Netizens and Cyberians

A shout out to those who coin words. GOOD FOR YOU! Sometimes the right word to use in a sentence eludes me and I find myself searching the web-Thesarus in hunt for the one that will fit in, just like a missing part of a jigsaw puzzle. 

When I taught remedial reading at the community college, one lesson was on the portmanteau concept, or creating a new word from two existing words. Smoke + fog = smog was my go-to because everyone could connect.

I want to call my classes back now and add a whole new set of words created out of necessity for web users. These coined words describe people who are not just citizens of a specific country, but people who choose to be members of the worldwide community called the internet.

There's a website that searches for word usage, Ngram viewer. Click over and have a go at searching when a particular word came upon the scene. Key in the word portmanteau while you are there and see the graph of its popularity. Click below on the dates and Google will search literature for the word. You'll read samples showing portmanteau as a suitcase in the 1800's and then its new meaning in the 1900's. I've posted about my fun with this writer's tool before. Check out my comments on the post from 2014, Word of the Day.

Last week I came across a wonderful new-to-me word, netizen. By the context of the sentence, I immediately knew the definition of the word. I recognized it as a portamteau of internet and citizen. It's in the title of several books. Where have I been that I hadn't heard this before? So I went to Ngram to find out when that word netizen first came on the scene. 

The graph tells it all. No such word in the eighties, it came onto the scene in the nineties, the earliest snippet I saw dated 1996.

The fun really started when I wondered what additional words had been coined as synonyms to netizen. Ding, ding, ding. Cybernaut. Infonaut. Cybersurfer. Cybercitizen. Cybercowboy. And my favorite cyberian, although I do know a few cybercowboys that earned the wild west connotation of their word.

According to Ngram, cybercowboy preceded netizen by a few years.

Back to cyberian. 

It's not quite as common as the other two, but to me, it seems cozier, more like a named community than a netizen of some other-worldly intangible, and certainly not as renegade as a cybercowboy. All that being said, I'm thinking I'm more of a fringe cyberian than those netizens who live and die by the internet. It's a tool for me rather than a lifestyle. I won't pledge allegiance to it, and I pray that no one ever will.

By the way, my mother, rest her soul, would not begin to understand that last paragraph.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen