Almost two months ago, Donna discussed the new term Sealioning. I was really excited when I read that there’s a term doxing, because I thought it might have something to do with dachshunds (doxies) and I wanted to surprise my doxie-owning coworker, Ron. Unfortunately, there are no dogs involved with this term.
The word doxing means to publish somebody’s personal information or to reveal their identity without their consent, often accompanied by threats and intimidation. In this case “dox” is short for “documents.” One example, according to the article, was from 2013. “Several high-profile celebrities, including Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian, were the victims of doxing after a hacker publicly revealed their addresses, social security numbers, and financial documents online.” Yuck. Life would be so much better if we just stuck to doing kind things and being loveable like dogs.
There were some other new and interesting words in this article from Dictionary.com. Here are a couple of them.
I was watching 9-1-1 (Austin or Lone Star or something), a show that entertains me with firefighters and police while I’m making dinner. On one of the episodes, there was someone calling the police and falsely reporting a serious crime. There’s a name for that! It’s called swatting (based on the SWAT teams called for potentially volatile situations). In the show, the intent was to have the police go to a man’s house full-force because he was an alleged kidnapper, drug dealer, and loser. The man ended up dying. As the dictionary says, “Swatting is extremely dangerous due to the unpredictable nature of such scenarios, when law enforcement officials believe they are entering a highly dangerous situation.” We’ve seen the results of that in the news. Let’s keep our swatting to flies!
Lastly, firehosing. Back to the firemen? Nope. In this case, firehosing is a tactic used to spread propaganda. It means to “release a large amount of false information in a very short amount of time. Due to the resources often needed to pull off such an expansive disinformation strategy, the term is most often used to refer to the actions of large organizations or government.”
The examples they mention include Russian propaganda during the invasion of Ukraine, Chinese propaganda responding to reports about the mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims, and, well, several events here in the U.S. where misinformation was spread.
These are only some of the new terms. Since they dragged me (and maybe you) down, I think we need to end with something better than doxing, swatting, and firehosing.
Kara Church
Pronouns: she/her
Technical Editor, Advisory
Editor’s Corner Archives: https://episystechpubs.com/
Editor's Corner 
Leave a Reply