160 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
principles introduced by the network.^52 The core principle is that
nicknames are not owned, in any permanent sense. When you join
a chatgroup, you may choose any nick you wish (within the limi-
tations imposed by the system – see below), but if someone else in
the group has already chosen that nick the software will not allow
you to use it. Nick clashes are not permitted. The task, then, is to
create a nick that is so distinctive that other people will not also hit
upon it, and thus enable you to stay with the same nick every time
you log-in to a particular group. As with all self-selected names
(such as car licence plates and CB handles), owners get attached
to them. The nick is their electronic identity: it says something
about who they are, and acts as an invitation to others to talk to
them. People who feel they belong to a particular group will wish
to retain that identity, if only to ensure that they are recognized as
being the same person each time they log on.^53 They get upset if
they find they cannot use it, for some reason – such as the German
character described by Haya Bechar-Israeli,Bonehead, who found
his name had been taken over by real-world neo-Nazis, and who
was thus forced to find an alternative (cLoNehEAd).^54 Unless the
group is very small, therefore, ordinary names (e.g.Fred,Sheila)
are thus unlikely to appear as nicks, because they stand a greater
chance of being duplicated. On the other hand, weird and won-
derful nicks are very much the norm, and their study is going to
provide onomastics with a fascinating domain in due course.
The devising of a nick is not as easy a task as might at first be
thought. Users are restricted to a single string of characters (in the
case of IRC, up to nine, with no spaces allowed). Any upper- and
lower-case letters can be used, along with numerals, hyphens, and
a few other keyboard symbols not already functional within the
(^52) It is also different in that chatgroup nicks are chosen by the users themselves, and not
given to them by others. In real life, also, a person may have several nicknames at once,
depending on the social circumstances, whereas only one at a time is allowed on a
53 chatgroup channel.
There have even been software programs written to help people preserve their nicks, e.g.
NickServ, a Germany-based nickname registration service. This ran from 1990 to 1994,
54 when problems of maintenance and equitable application forced it to close.
Bechar-Israeli (1996).