Namcub

Namcub (or nam-šub) is the Sumerian word for an incantation or self-fulfilling prophecy. The concept (and anglicized spelling "nam-shub") was popularized by Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.

Meaning and nuances

Various namcub have been used in Sumerian Mythology, primarily by the Gods, for various purposes. As is noted in Snow Crash, most of the uses correspond to mental or psychological changes, as opposed to changes in the physical world, which in the context of the book implies that it is an early form of NLP. Some examples are its use in Enki and Innana and the Me, in which a namcub is used to alternately command Nuddimud (in this myth a servant of Enki, not a pseudonym for Enki himself) and make him forget the commands (by Innana), and in "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta", which contains the best known namcub (the Namcub of Nuddimud, written in Snow Crash as "The Namshub of Enki").

Notation, transliteration, and confusion

Neal Stephenson used primarily the works of Samuel Kramer as a source (including his translation of "The Namshub of Enki"), and in the process propagated a non-standard transliteration of various words, including namcub. By using the spelling Namshub (which was a rough phonetic transliteration by Kramer, whose work predates most of the standard transliteration techniques for the Sumerian language), he popularized a spelling that is incompatible with current techniques and notation^{[citation needed]}. The 'c' in namcub in this article is a specialized notation for the 'š', which is pronounced like the 'sh' in "ship".