003: The Amazing Zoltair

Be it through movies or personal experience, we can all picture this scene in our mind’s eye – a middle-aged man, his face accentuated by a handlebar mustache, near-chanting his sales pitch in a staccato voice. The man is wearing a red-and-white stripped shirt and a stout, almost comical, straw hat.

“Hurry, hurry! Step right up! The Amazing Zoltair will guess your age for only one dollar!”

Now, imagine I could perform the same feat without any sort of number game or trick, perhaps not with the accuracy of an oracle, but at least as precise as to pinpoint a decade.

Click Below to Read More on this Phenomenon's Effect for Educators

Certainly, one of the major appeals of virtual worlds, such as Second Life, is the anonymity associated with creating an online persona, so does the fact that many of us weaned on the Internet know how old you are instill a sense of privacy invasion?

The answer to a person’s real life age lies in their conversations – specifically their spelling and punctuation. Here is an example:

“do you wanna see the new sim i found today?”
“Sure, let me finish loading first. Internet’s a bit slow today.”

Simply put, the most basic grammar rules hammered into each and every one of us (myself by the stereotypical nun with a ruler), are what trigger the alarms that you do not come from my generation. For example, capitalization at the beginning of every sentence, commas to separate thoughts, apostrophes to signify contractions, and the lack of any usage of the infamous “LOL” tell me that you are at least thirty years old. Of course, more exact dating comes from the vocabulary you use, the questions you ask, and an overall sense of your personality, but for all intents and purposes, I know you are an adult hanging out in a virtual world.

The rise of the Internet has created many things, one of which is its own language. Fluency in this language is taught by the most captivating and efficient of all teachers: social pressure. The language, at least in the U.S., is the common “tongue” for all written communications, such as instant messaging, cell phone texting, and in-game chatting. Difficult to interpret at first since it seems that there are no pauses in ideas and that there are enough spelling errors to make the Word Paperclip blow a fuse, Internet-speak eventually becomes second nature. Created out of a need to express ideas faster as well as a touch of laziness, its prevalence cannot be denied. Some abbreviations, such as “lol,” “brb,” and “jk,” have found their way into the everyday spoken word and also, to the chagrin of English teachers everywhere, into school essays.

It is interesting to note that my pet peeve is the inability to properly use sound-alike words, such as “your and you’re.” However, when chatting online, I find it completely acceptable to use a single, shortened version of both forms, “ur,” to mean either the possessive or the contraction. Of course, this brings up many implications for student-teacher relationships in virtual classrooms. When I first began working for Professor Bloomfield, I did not know whether to call him by his avatar name or his real life name. As of right now, I am at an odd combination of using both names interchangeably depending on who else we are interacting with. In addition, I found myself slipping into Internet-speak whenever we talked to each other in-game. It is an unconscious happening, but whenever my fingers touch the keyboard using any program other than Word, I instantly revert to text abbreviations and slang. Questions and confusions will abound – how will professors maintain respect if students are unsure what to call them or how to talk to them? Will learning tools, such as virtual discussion rooms, degrade into Internet-speak laden arguing?

This is not to say that everyone should adopt the language simply because it is becoming a norm on the Internet. Proper grammar still peeks out from the darkness, even among my generation. For example, a stray apostrophe to signify the difference between “well” and “we’ll” will find its way into a sentence riddled with abbreviations. I know in my own experience with writing, I can still hear the sharp crack of a wooden ruler on my desk and see the fiery, foreboding eyes of Sister Felix every time I make a mistake.

AJ Tan is a senior at Cornell University majoring in Applied Economics and Management.
He can be reached at ant27@cornell.edu or in Second Life as “Roflcopter Robonaught.”