Hey, Cypher here, and I’m starting a new series called Engaging Etymology, because
as John Green says it “historians are really good at naming things,” sarcastically of
course.
Anyways, I figured this could be a good vehicle for delivering short doses of my history vlogs,
and for the first time, as a podcast under my Cynical Cypher name.
So I figured for the first one, I would explain my pseudonym’s own meaning.
A cipher is normally a code for making a form of communication secretive.
It is the very element that converts encryption for your emails or that silly secret language
you made up as a kid to say things behind peoples backs.
I took the pseudonym very young (somewhere in my preteens) only knowing that about it,
but it became deeper and more meaningful as I learned what it was.
Cipher’s etymology holds significance in mathematical history.
So the term cipher goes very far back, from the ancient Indian term sunya-s, meaning nothingness.
Its english roots, though, are in the Arabic term sifr, meaning zero.
Before cipher entered English or Latin, there was no zero, at least as we use it today.
Think how hard it is to count stuff with roman numerals...Just look at what the number for
this year looks like and you will instantly understand.
It is an inefficient way of counting things.
It is a misconception to say that there was no zero whatsoever in the ancient world.
Zero, as in the whole number before one, was obviously understood as nothing, naught, or
null.
We just didn’t use it for counting beyond zero.
Then came arabic numerals.
The number system we use today came from the second Muslim Caliphate.
They used sifr just as we do, and through cultural intermixing of the crusades and the
silk road, the system became known.
The great mathematician Fibonacci wrote a treatise on why Europe should adopt the system,
and slowly it did so, infusing the word cipher into English in the process.
The reason why don’t use the term cipher to describe zero anymore is that the term
zero has the same roots, and entered English through French, eventually supplanting.
Something many English speakers don’t realize is that our language doesn’t really support
redundant words, so when two words are perfectly interchangeable, one of them generally fades
away from usage.
Synonyms have slightly different meanings from one another and cannot perfect replace
each other.
This will come up again with cipher.
As the years crept by cipher began to be used in terms of the changing of words to numbers
for cryptography.
There is a lot of change and history in cryptography, but suffice it say, numbering letters or words
goes back thousands of years, and using arabic numerals was inevitable.
Especially as the word zero supplanted cipher, its use in cryptography grew more prominent,
until that was it’s only English usage.
Ciphering and deciphering became commonplace words, but have recently been made redundant
by the term encryption.
The term encryption is rooted in computer scientist jargon from the 1970’s.
Before that, the root word crypto- was used for saying something was mysterious or somehow
alike, such as cryptology and crypto-fascist.
With the rise of the word encryption we no longer use the word cipher normally, because
it is redundant.
Though decipher seems to be slower in its passing.
The only use now is the encryption key of some type of encryption can still concretely
be called the cipher.
But there is one more change in this words usage that has sprung up since the rise of
encryption.
Hackers have been taking it as handles (which is jargon that simply means pseudonym) since
the craft started needing to have handles.
That is where I derive mine.
This brought a subtle change to the word though.
Back in 1971, the Anarchist Cookbook was first published.
This became a goto manual for phone phreakers and early hackers.
In it there was an a chapter about how words were supposed to be changed around in their
spelling.
It specified that I-s were supposed to be changed to Y’s.
That is why you see my name in the channel title spelled with a Y.
Heck, my adolescent self didn’t know about the cookbook until my father showed me it
in my early teens, but I spelled it with a Y anyways.
Plus it just works with the cynical bit.
And that’s all you ever needed to know about the word cipher and its etymology.
Strange how one word can have such historical significance, huh?
Trust me, the upcoming episodes will have just as much.
So subscribe to get that, and I'll see you next time.