High-tech world spawns plethora of suffix uses

Question: "Suffix it to say" we live in a world where almost everyone is addicted to something, becoming maybe an alcoholic, chocaholic, foodaholic, or workaholic. What suffixes are best known by the techaholics among us?

Answer: Call them also Webaholics (the Web), Twitterholics (Twitter), gameaholics (computer games in general), says Paul McFedries in "IEEE Spectrum" magazine. The suffix workhorse in these circles is "-ware," short for software and spawning such classics as freeware (free software), shareware (software you can use before purchasing) and vaporware (announced but not delivered). Beerware you can get for the price of buying the developer a beer, terrorware is software used by terrorists, and wearware goes back a few years to an article about wearable computers.

Reading this, you are likely part of the literati (literary intelligentsia or educated class). At your computer, you join the digerati (digital literati), or the geekerati (the elite of this group), maybe even the jitterati with a cup of caffeinated coffee on the side, or the blogerati (big-time bloggers), or the Twitterati (those with the most Twitter followers). The universe is certainly big enough to encompass the Googleverse, the Twitterverse, the gamerverse (gamers or gaming), plus the chatosphere (chat rooms and instant messaging), the spamosphere (junk e-mail messages), the blogosphere, the Webosphere.

And there's more, but perhaps by now you've had it with our lallapalooza of a suffixpalooza.

Question: It's a "duck" in cricket, "love" in tennis, and the number of goalkeepers in a game of badminton; it's also the number of cabbages on Mars, hedgehogs that can speak Japanese, or fish fingers eaten by William Shakespeare. As a temperature of -273 Celsius, it is "absolute," the lowest possible with all heat and motion spent. Oddly, the Romans overlooked it in their system of numerals (I, II, III, IV, V …), and not until much later was the symbol introduced to the West. By itself, it doesn't amount to much, but combined with other numbers, it can add a googol of meaning or more. You can't divide by this number, though you can add it or subtract it, even multiply by it. Enough said.

There is nought, zilch, nil chance you haven't yet zeroed in on this mystery number.

Answer: "Zero" it is, as in "absolute zero" to physicists eyeing the lowest possible temperature of -273 degrees Celsius, and in "googol" to mathematicians thinking of 1 followed by a hundred zeroes, says Richard Phillips in "Facts, Figures and Fiction." Importantly, zero allows the use of "place value" to represent numbers such as 60; 600; 6,000 and on and on. The number apparently was invented independently in several different cultures but not until the 12th century did it reach Western Europe.