52 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
two such circumstances, both of which undermine the maxim of
quality.
Aspoofis any message whose origin is suspect; the sending of
such messages,spoofing, is commonplace in some Internet situa-
tions. Unattributed utterances may be introduced into a virtual-
worlds conversation, for example. Normally, each conversational
turn is preceded by the name of the player, along the lines ofMole
says, ‘I’m hungry.’ But it is possible for a player to interpolate an
utterance with no name preceding, such as:An angry lion appears
in the doorway. Spoof utterances may also be inserted by the soft-
ware, and not by any of the participants. When a spoof is noticed,
the players may condemn it, question it, or play about with it. The
result can be a fresh element of fun injected into a game which is
palling, with everybody knowing what is going on and willingly
participating. Equally, because spoofing can confuse other players,
and severely disrupt a game which is proceeding well, the various
guides to manners in virtual worlds tend to be critical of it, and
discourage it. Some groups insist on displaying the identity of the
spoofer, such as by making the sender add his/her nick afterwards:
1,000 linguists have converged on Parliament – Doc.^37 Because there
is no way of knowing whether the content of a spoof is going to be
true (with reference to the rest of the conversation) or false, such
utterances introduce an element of anarchy into the co-operative
ethos of conversation.
A similar problem arises withtrolling, the sending of a message (a
troll) specifically intended to cause irritation to others, such as the
members of a chatgroup. It is an innocent-sounding question or
statement,delivereddeadpan,andusuallyshort,thoughsometrolls
are verbose in their apparent cluelessness. For example, somebody
who wanted to troll a linguistics group might send the message
I’ve heard that the Eskimo language has 1,000 words for snow– then
sit back to enjoy the resulting explosions.^38 The term derives from
fishing(thetrailingofabaitedhooktoseewhatbites),thoughitalso
(^37) This is the procedure followed in Cherny’s group (Cherny 1999: 115).
(^38) For the reason, see Pullum and McCawley (1991).