Twitter nouns and verbs
Something’s been nagging me lately: the various verbs and nouns used to describe the act of posting a twitter message and referring to a message itself. Here’s what’s out there, with definitions from Merriam Webster:
- noun 1: a trembling agitation 2: a small tremulous intermittent sound (as of birds)
- intransitive verb 1: to utter successive chirping noises 2 to talk in a chattering fashion
- noun 1 : an act of twitting 2 : a silly annoying person
- transitive verb 1 : to subject to light ridicule or reproach 2 : to make fun of as a fault
- noun : a chirping note
- also lists intransitive verb
It seems that by definition twit/twitted is a clear nonstarter. I just heard a correspondent on NPR say “twitted” which just doesn’t sound right.
Twitter seems to reference a series of chirping noises or an intermittent sound. This suggests a plurality of tweets which by definition is “a chirping note.” So it seems to me that if we define one twitter message as a single utterance, then one Twitter message is indeed one tweet. And a cluster of successive tweets would qualify as a twitter. So with these rules in mind (and I know they’re meticulous), here’s some hypothetical usage:
Right
“Jeez man, how many tweets does that make for you today?”
“Dude your last tweet was so hilarious, I nearly choked on my overpriced Panera sandwich!”
“I heard Jennifer Aniston dumped John Mayer because of his excessive twittering. I bet they broke up over something else and Twitter paid her for the pub.”
“Stop tweeting or you’re going to kill my battery.”
Wrong
“Did you reply to my last twitter?”
“Are you following my twitters?”
“I just twitted about that Wash Post story.”
How do you say it? Like Stephen Colbert?
Update 4/21
Just saw StockTwits. So technically, the name implies silly, annoying stock gossipers.
Bravo! A post on Twitter usage. There’s nothing like this on the Chicago Manual of Style.
What is the person that tweets called ? A twitterer ? or tweeter ?
I like tweeter better, myself. But I think they’d both be correct. I think twitter/twittered/twitterer is catching on faster than tweet/tweeted/tweeter because the services formal name, Twitter.
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