meaning - What does web-mistress imply as a job title

I love that none needs my permission to take my code and do something cool with it, and someone else can do the same with that code. I love that an "end user" is usually only a few hours work away from being an active documenter, bug-reporter, web-mistress or coder in most projects.

As a result, I despise anything which artificially raises barriers to entry for programmers and users. Everything from stupid software patents, to bad user interfaces, cabalesque knowledge and crummy code.

~ Rusty Russell

I went through the above quote, and basically have three questions:

1. 
   

   documenter: Why does this word show as having a spelling mistake? I think I can write it similar to a "writer" being "one who writes". Why can't a "documenter" be "one who documents"

   
   


2. 
   

   web-mistress: I have no clue exactly what this job title means? What are the roles and responsibilities of a "web-mistress", and what are the activities they are involved in routinely? Even though a quick google shows web-mistress to be a female webmaster, I believe this is hardly the job title any company would be giving to its employees. It sounds and implies slang use of "Mistress".

   
   


3. 
   

   cabalesque: This is another word which even Google can't find. I guess it's Spanish (from cabales which means "not to be in one's right mind", masculine plural noun) or a derived word from other languages. Can you help me understand the probable meaning of this word as used in the context above?

   
   

Answer

While these are three unrelated words, they share some characteristics: all are produced by modifying existing words in particular ways that are fairly standard.

You're right that a documenter would be one who documents; in general, adding "-r" or "-er" to a verb very often means someone who often does that verb. Your automated spell-checker doesn't have enough of a vocabulary to tell that automatically, though.

Your intuition about "web-mistress" being related to "webmaster" is also correct. But in compound words using "master", substituting "mistress" is usually not going to make anyone* think of the modern slang usage of "mistress" on its own, since the other words qualify the meaning to be a particular sort of master or mistress… and that almost always means starting from the most basic and literal sense of the word, which is still generally known by native speakers. So this coined word means nothing other than a female webmaster. (It's unlikely to be a formal job title; rather, it's most likely a somewhat whimsical title taken on by the lady herself. This sort of playful self-naming is fairly common among geeks, especially those who work more or less independent of conventional job structures.)

"Cabalesque" has a rather uncommon productive suffix, "-esque" (which means "like" or "in the manner of", and is often separated with a hyphen to make it easier to distinguish). Given that, and the way "cabal" can mean "a small group of people who work together secretly" (MW), "cabalesque knowledge" means something like "cryptic knowledge like that of some old secret societies, carefully isolated from outsiders". (Per Nelson, it can especially refer to highly specialized technical knowledge that has never been shared with those outside a small group, whether intentionally trying to keep it secret or simply not putting effort into sharing that knowledge.)

_{*Except amateur comedians on the Internet, anyway.}