No, not OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) but OCPD (Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder): Both sound bad, but Psychology Today highlights the significant difference between these two diagnoses. While I may have “a touch of” the latter (I am self-admittedly a neat freak, obsessively organized, and famous for my radially symmetrical salads), I fortunately am not afflicted with the former. Personally, though, as a “sufferer,” I think OCPD needs a new name. First, it is too easily confused with OCD, the debilitating, repetitive thought-behavior malady. As the PT article indicates, OCPD personality traits can be the very ones than make individuals successful. Second, I find calling it a “disorder” incredibly ironic. Anyone with the “symptoms” of OCPD will tell you that it is entirely about order (I prefer the term “syntropy“), not disorder! Third, I do not find the name sufficiently descriptive. How about “picky personality type”, or “hyperfussbudgetivia”, or “perfectionomia”, or just (à la the subtitle of this blog) “control freak”? That is a label I identify with, even if I might not wear it with the same pride as the equally appropriate appellation, “nerd”.
On the subject of this blog’s title, and apropos of OCPD, I took the “cyber” prefix in the multi-pun “cybernaught” in part from cybernetics, the engineering discipline of control and communication. Cybernetics derives from the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman or rudder, the control mechanism for a ship. Following William Gibson’s coining of the term cyberspace and the popularity of the World Wide Web, “cyber” has come to be associated with all things Internet, this blog being one monumentally insignificant corner thereof. So, as a devotee of cybernetics and a control freak, I found “cybernaught” an appropriate name for this sojourner’s little nothing of a contribution to the Web.