Nomss de Blitz

Are students making a statement about identity in the e-mail era? Or are they just tired of typing?

A COMMON STUDENT AMUSEMENT, two or three generations ago, was to think up funny names for members of the faculty. Some are fanny still. Take the student way of referring to the late Professor Kenneth Robinson of the English department. Professor Robinson occasionally stammered a little, and when he did it sounded like this: "On Friday there'll be a-a-a-a paper due." He became universally known (to students) as Rapid-Fire Robinson.

Or consider how the undergrads referred to the late Professor Leon Burr Richardson. This imposing man they called Cheerless Richardson. It wasn't because he went around looking gloomy all the time, or sometimes dashed a manly tear. The name served to distinguish him from another Professor Richard- son, an enthusiastic man commonly if somewhat disrespectfully called The Cheerful Idiot. And, of course, it kept Rapid-Fire separate from yet a third Professor Richardson, known as Clothespin.

such names have now vanished. None of the numerous students I asked could cite a single nickname for a current member of the faculty.

Does this mean that undergrads in 1998 are less verbally playful than their predecessors? It does not. It just means they have shifted targets. These days they are busy nicknaming themselves—and these are names they will use electronically blitzing—Dartmouth's unique version of e-mailing—from computer to computer. About 90 percent of the undergrads have at least one nom de blitz, and 50 or 60 percent have two or more says Lawrence Levine, director of computing at the College. Randy Spydell, associate director, puts the total number of student call-names at between 5,000 and 10,000.

As far as the College is concerned, almost anything goes. There's a student you can reach as Olive Oyl, and another who is simply joke. (Lower case names are common.) There's a third known only as fy. You'll hear more about him later.

By my reckoning, students' noms de blitz come in three types. The first kind is severely practical. Students who pick them are interested in logging on with minimum effort and maximum speed. Consider the name used most of the time by the '98 whose nom de birth certificate is Rachel Riordan Federman. In the world of blitz she's just rac. (You pronounce it like what wine bottles rest on.) "I chose it only b/c I wanted a name that would allow me to sign on without much typing," rac explains.

Similarly, Kristin Luckinbill '01 is lucks, Michael Hay '98 is mgh, and so forth. "This is a case where fast thinking in my efficient mind really paid off," mgh told me recently—by blitz, of course. He even, in planning his blitz name, took the keyboard into account, "'m' is located very close to 'g' and 'h,' which are next to each other."

Short names are very much in the American grain. We are the country of kwik-marts and lite beer. In England they have a concept called "honour" and another called "glamour." We just have "honor" and "glamor." Credit goes to Noah Webster, Yale class of 1778. Webster did the first important American dictionary, and in it he systematically tried to shorten words, the way you might give someone a haircut. He didn't always succeed—for example, that thing lolling in the human mouth just behind the teeth has not become the "tung"—but he always tried. He'd be pleased with our present undergraduates.

Category two is ideological. Here are names that carry messages and that proclaim loyalties. Dean Krishna '01, for example, is known in the world of blitz as Go Cubs98, while another undergrad does business as Broncosrule. One crunchie (this is the current term for granola-eaters) combines extreme brevity with extreme loyalty to a healthy diet. Electronically, he is oat. The student known as Hay duke is proclaiming spiritual kinship with the hero of Edward Abbey's wonderful novel The Monkey wrench Gang. Monogamouslychallengedis...,well, I'm not sure what monogamously challenged is claiming, but it sounds interesting.

The third category is the hidden message, or private joke. And we come back to fy, a senior who doesn't want me to use his nom de birth certificate. That's fine with is much quicker to type.

So where did this name come from, and what is the private joke? tell it: "I was trying to think of a short nickname, and I could not come up with one I liked. 'FY FAEN' I said (fy faen means 'shit' in Norwegian)—and I realized I had it!fy was unique (in fact I bet there are few Norwegians with the nickname fy). Also fortunate was that there are only four million people who speak Norwegian, and only about four on campus."

Naturally, blitz-names strike down to something deeper than mere shortness, or the chance to support a team, or even the pleasure of a hi dden meaning. And most of our students are well aware of the depths. I'll quote just three. First, snackman (Richard Sherman'01): "We cannot pick what we want to be called when we are born. Blitz gives us the opportunity to take names that really say something and are not just arbitrary."

Cutie Lou (Stacey Morris '99) says this: "Blitz Mail and e-mail are emotion- less forms of communication. Through these names, people take the smallest step to show that they are unique individuals and not just an account without a face, a choice, and an imagination."

The last word belongs to rac. The nom de blitz, she says, "fits into a culture of technology, and the implied loss of identity in the modern world. We are signified by an invention to save-time rather than identified in any meaningful way. We are ahistorical, we have dismissed the name that spoke of our lineage, given to us by our parents and ancestors, to replace it with something faster." Like rac, for example.

One more word. I don't mean to imply that students provide all the interesting blitz-names on campus. They surely don't. There is one College employee (he works at the Inn) who logs on as Archimedes Plutonium, which happens to be his legal name, too. But that's another story.

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Writer NOEL PERRIN can be reached at .