Nickonyms of Classical Writers in Internet Discourse
Dmitriy Bral'nin · Virtual Communication and Social Networks · 2025
Names of classical writers are often mentioned in social media as nickonyms, i.e., a digital representation of culturally significant historical figures. This article introduces an onomastic analysis of nickonyms that designate classical writers in polycoded texts of internet communication. The nickonyms collected as part of this neural network experiment were calibrated against the existing multidimensional classifications of internetonyms. The concept of nickname did not prove to coincide with that of pseudonym: for classical writers, the digital name is no sign of authorship as it fulfills other functions. Most of the nickonyms originated from the English transliteration of the basic anthroponym, but the more creative ones were semantically reinterpreted contaminated constructions with a wide range of evaluative identifiers, from neutral to strongly positive ones. While the research refines the existing classification of nickonyms in relation to a narrow corpus of canonical literary figures, it lays foundations for comparative studies of other network anthroponyms. The model classical author – nickonym in a polycoded text could be used to design recognizable names for internet accounts with efficient identification markers.