Cryptozoology to Crypto-Fascism: The Story of Hackers' Favorite Prefix

I don’t own any bitcoins, and I don’t really understand Dogecoin, but I’ve come to love cryptocurrencies anyway, because let’s face it: crypto- is the best prefix. But currency is merely the latest to carry the cryptodistinction, and neologisms that use it date back centuries, even as they're booming now.

Like a King Midas of mystery, crypto- somehow makes every word it touches totally badass. I thought maybe it was the air of death from “crypt,” but the Oxford English Dictionary tracks the prefix back beyond, to the Greek word kryptos meaning “hidden.”

Ironically, however, crypto- is now all around us, perhaps in plainer sight than ever before. In addition to cryptocurrencies, take, for instance the NSA. Its original role was cryptanalysis—breaking codes. The word "cryptography" goes back to the 17th century—days of cyphers and analog codes—while "encryption," in reference to computers, dates back to 1975, though discussions of how to protect the contents of one’s messages are only now becoming commonplace across the mainstream.

But enough of the crypto-obvious. Let’s dive down beyond the altcoins and secret phone recordings to the hidden cryptodepths. The crypto-crypts.

While the word "cryptology" dates back to the 1640s, the mysterious prefix rather appropriately lurks in the fringes of language, and has been creating some of the English language's most wonderful and strange portmanteaus. Some sound like science and some sound like slurs. Some sound like they legitimately belong to other languages. Starting with:

A cryptogram can be a message written in code, or just a symbol with secret or occult meaning. For me personally, it just signifies a Deerhunter album, but according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word cryptogram only dates back to 1880 and is “a modern word coined in English; though the elements are Greek, the ancient Greeks would find it barbarous.”

Does that make it crypto-Greek, or a crypto-English word, lurking under a guise of Greekness? At any rate, “cryptogram” might well have opened the doors to grafting crypto- onto pretty much anything you want. It's still most convincing when attached to other Greek-Latin words, such as:

Cryptozoology is the study of animals that are only rumored to exist, and it's both really awesome—leading to some of the best rogue taxidermy you’ll ever see—and also really obnoxious, because it’s responsible for the existence of shows like Bigfoot Hunters. It’s also annoying because there’s enough of a history of unconfirmed mythical creatures that end up being real—for instance, white people dismissed the existence of gorillas as local folklore until 1847—that some cryptozoologists demand to be taken seriously as scientists.

There are plenty of species left to be discovered, but the cryptozoologist type that bugs me isn’t writing detailed descriptions of beetle specimen, they're filming someone wearing a Chewbacca mask in the woods or working their damndest to confirm the existence of werewolves. I know, I know—I'm going to be proved wrong. Can't wait.

Even though all its constituent parts are Latin-Greek, Webster's College Dictionary only dates "cryptozoology" back to 1955-60. It's a fittingly made-up word for a mostly made-up science.

But crypto- can grant more than just a moment of suspended judgment. It can also make a barb sting a little worse. Take, for instance, a bit of proto-reality TV that taught the world the term:

“….As far as I can tell the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can see here is yourself. Failing that—“

“Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi.”

Ah, if you haven’t had the pleasure of watching two of America’s greatest public intellectuals have a discussion about First Amendment rights that devolves into a name calling and threats of physical violence, give yourself that gift right now.

Apparently Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley had just watched footage of the Chicago cops clubbing hippies in Lincoln Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Buckley was defending the actions of the cops as necessary for maintaining order, while Gore Vidal defended the rights and actions of the hippies as protected free speech and right of assembly. As articulate and professorial as they both seem, they’re also both peppering their speeches with catty little slights at the other, until finally Vidal straight up calls Buckley a "crypto-Nazi."

Naturally Vidal later recanted, clarifying that he meant to call Buckley a "crypto-fascist," a term the philosopher Theodor Adorno coined five years earlier. A crypto-fascist is someone hiding their fascist leanings in the interest of political expedience, but Vidal explained that the moderator bringing up the Nazis a moment before distracted him.

Nevertheless, the insult achieved what Vidal wanted it to. "Looking and sounding not unlike Hitler, but without the charm, [Buckley] began to shriek insults in order to head me off, and succeeded, for by then my mission was accomplished: Buckley had revealed himself," Vidal wrote in Esquire in 1969. While Buckley wasn't a literal Nazi, of course, "in a larger sense his views are very much those of the founders of the Third Reich who regarded blacks as inferiors, undeclared war as legitimate foreign policy, and the Jews as sympathetic to international communism," Gore said.

So this one's a stinger. This next though, sounds even worse:

Yes, the crypto-Jews. It sounds like an insult that even Buckley and Vidal wouldn't touch, but it's actually more sociological and not an insult at all. Simply, it's people who, through religious persecution, are forced to practice Judaism secretly. In the southwest United States, though, the term refers specifically to people whose Judaism was hidden even from themselves.

Back in 1391 in Spain, anti-Semitic riots led to thousands of Jewish deaths and also thousands of new converts. If scaring people to convert to your religion doesn’t strike you as a way to get very devoted followers, you’d be right.

To escape the Inquisition, they fled to Portugal, then to the New World, as the Inquisition followed, rooting and stomping out Judaism as it went. According to a 2009 Harper’s article on the subject, all that was left in the end in a pocket of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon was a Hispanic population who aligned their beds north-south, lit candles on Friday night, and wore hats at Saturday church, but who didn’t really know why they did these things, until the work of New Mexico's state historian Stanley Hordes in the early 1980s brought the story of crypto-Judaism's journey to a wider audience.

There are some doubts about whether or not any crypto-Jews actually exist or if they’re just Seventh Day Adventists looking to spice up their identity. As the story of crypto-Judaism circulated in the press, Harpers wrote that “people in New Mexico ‘came out’ as Jewish; they spoke of reclaiming their ‘compromised identities’; they professed a link to Judaism because they 'looked Jewish,' or because…they had an unusual number of Jewish friends.” So the link in some cases was…tenuous, let's say.

But even if there isn’t always proof of a crypto-lineage, there is definitely a number of people who self-identify as crypto-Jewish. And although it's not at all an offensive term in origin, it's probably best not to shout it at someone on the street.

Naturally this list is nowhere near exhaustive, as there are cryptoanarchists, cryptoteria (a taxonomic suborder of turtles and tortoises) and cryptoparties (to which I'm clearly never invited).

But it should be enough to implore you to seek out and bring to light future crypto- objects, or at least have something to change the subject to, should you find yourself cornered by some Bitcoin enthusiasts. And if you already are a Bitcoin enthusiast, take heart that, while right now Bitcoin is in the Oxford Dictionary and cryptocurrency isn't, it took other cryptoterminology a little time to catch on as well.