New tools bring new possibilities for work and leisure alike, and one of the more curious among these is the sport of “geocaching.” All you need to get involved is a GPS (that is, a Global Positioning System receiver, now found in almost every new smartphone) and information about the location of a cache: a container hidden at a particular location, typically containing a logbook.
With millions of active players, and caches hidden across the world, it’s effectively history’s largest treasure hunt. And it all began in May 2000, when the American government switched off the “Selective Availability” technology it had hitherto been applying to GPS signals in order to ensure that only military equipment could use them to an accuracy of better than a few hundred feet.
With this, civilian GPS equipment suddenly became accurate to within a few tens of feet—and it took only a few days for computer engineer Dave Ulmer to announce to a newsgroup interested in satellite navigation that he had hidden a “stash” at a particular set of coordinates.
Initially dubbed a “GPS stash hunt,” or “gpsstashing” for short, some vigorous online discussion soon concluded that stash had unfortunate negative connotations thanks to its link to drugs (indeed, the word entered English at the end of the eighteenth century directly from the realm of criminal slang) and that cache was preferable (a word which arrived in English at around the same time as stash, coming from an identical French Canadian term used by trappers to denote where they hid their stores—a word itself derived from the French verb cacher, “to conceal”).
Credit for the term geocaching is usually given to Matte Stum, a member of the original discussion group and pioneering geocacher. The prefix “geo-” itself derives from the ancient Greek word ge, “earth,” and occurs in numerous English words—as well as a few specialized items of geocaching vocabulary, such as geonick, which denotes the public nickname of a geocacher; and geoswag, denoting the goodies found concealed within some caches.81
While its use of technology is inherently new, geocaching itself fits into a long tradition of treasure hunts and games, the most significant of which is “letterboxing.” Like many eccentric games, letterboxing dates back to Victorian England, and to walkers in Dartmoor in the west of England. According to an 1854 guidebook, a local tradition involved walkers leaving letters or postcards in a box on one of the trails across the moor, to be delivered at a later date by another walker who happened to come across the box.82
Alongside geocaching, letterboxing itself still exists today in the United Kingdom and America, embracing a variety of different kinds of box. Some don’t even physically exist, thanks to the young practice of concealing “virtual letterboxes” within a website, consisting of an image of a letterbox whose location may be revealed by solving a number of online clues.
Both geocaching and letterboxing have their specialized vocabularies, including extensive acronyms for possible outcomes like “Did Not Find” (DNF) and “Found in Good Shape” (FIGS). One rather different word worth a mention is the common term for a nongeocacher: a muggle. The word is borrowed directly from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, in which it denoted a non-magic-using outsider. Being caught by such an outsider retrieving a geocache is known as being “muggled,” while a cache damaged or uncovered by a nonexpert can also be described as “muggled”—a textbook case of life and language imitating art.