![]() ![]() The blue bird icon evokes a smile, like the Amazon up-turned-arrow smile - in contrast to the X that Musk has imposed. “Dictionaries are usually pretty tentative or cautious about letting new words in, especially for new phenomena, because they don’t want things to be just a flash in the pan.”Īs Twitter grew into a global communications platform and struggled with misinformation, trolls and hate speech, its friendly brand image remained. “Getting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it,” said Jack Lynch, a Rutgers University English professor who studies the history of language. The Associated Press Stylebook entered it in 2010. The Oxford English Dictionary added “tweet” in 2011. ![]() No other social network has a word for posting that’s entered the vernacular like “tweet” - though Google did the same for “googling.” News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV programs scroll them. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.įor now, we still tweet, retweet and quote tweet, and sometimes - perhaps not often enough - delete tweets. Former President Donald Trump’s incendiary use of the bird app quickly punted “tweet” into near-constant headlines during his presidency. World leaders, celebrities and athletes, dissidents in repressive regimes, propaganda trolls, sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and actual queens. We’ve been tweeting for well over a decade. But “twittered” doesn’t roll off the tongue and “tweet” soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams “went one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,” when he bought the URL for from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said.Īt the beginning, people didn’t “tweet” - it was “I’m going to twitter this,” Bilton recalled. It was “twttr” - without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. You don’t get to decide it,” said Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” about Twitter’s origins. And it can’t be controlled, it can’t be created, it can’t be morphed. “Language has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. Upending that takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world’s richest men. With “tweets,” Twitter accomplished in just a few years something few companies have done in a lifetime: It became a verb and implanted itself into the lexicon of America and the world. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says “tweet” to publish it. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Elon Musk may want to send “tweet” back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site he now calls X is here to stay - at least for now.įor one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter.
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