The Linguistics of Cyberspace – Footnotes

semiotics
the science of signs and of systems of signs; the scientific foundation of modern linguistics.
cyberspace
First coined by author William Gibson in his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, which predicted an information economy built around cyberspace. The word itself is a misnomer, as Gibson himself has admitted; it’s a compound of the Greek root cyber- (meaning control) and the English -space, denoting dimension. It may be used as noun or adjective.
userid
The user’s name on the net. The word is a compound of user and the common clipping id for identification or identifier.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
Founder of the science of semiotics and of modern linguistics.
news server
computer which performs the actual posting of news articles for a user and which receives the posts from elsewhere on the net. A compound of news (in the sense of computer “news” articles or postings) and server (in the sense of file server, a machine which contains information for shared access).
newsreader
program which accesses the articles stored on a newsserver and makes them accessible in coherent form. A compound of news and reader.