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New York Times Bans Use of Word "Tweet"
An anonymous reader writes "New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett has had enough of his journalists' sloppy writing. Their offense? Using the 'inherently silly' word 'tweet' 18 times in the last month. In an internal memo obtained by theawl.com, he orders his writers to use alternatives, such as '"use Twitter" ... or "a Twitter update."' He admits that ' ... new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words ...' After all, he points out, ' ... another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion.' Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use."
While this sounds like it could as well be an Onion story, the memo is being widely reported.
Someone had to do it.
I cringe every time I hear the word 'tweet'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's about time.
Imagine imagine yourself reading the NYT archive from the 1920s and finding "flivver" or "flapper". Now imagine someone in a hundred years reading the archive of the now-current NYT and finding "tweet". Same deal.
He's may be too uptight* about it, but his idea is not completely without merit.
[*: 40 years ago?]
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Sounds like good editorial policy to me.
"Tweet" is almost as bad as "blogosphere."
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IF a new service sprung up tomorrow, everyone would STILL call them tweets.
That will forever be the term.
Typical old media school thinking
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The New York Times isn't going anywhere very soon. Of the two, it's more likely that Twitter would be eclipsed by some new service and the word "tweet" would return to being a sound birds make.
Certainly, for archival purposes, thinking about people in the future who might be reading news articles for research, "sent via Twitter" or something similar is more understandable than "tweeted" At least you could infer that Twitter was a messaging service from "sent via Twitter".
The word "tweet" might lead future historians to believe people went around making bird noises.
Putting moderation advice in your
From historic perspective it makes sense. These services come and go, and imagine someone reading NY times 20 years from now.
Twitter maybe replaced in future, and again again again... Imagine trying to understand the jungle of words from twenty years from now like "Buzzed, Tweeted...", when they really mean just "Twitter update".
This obsession of tech companies with co-opting or coining their own verbs is pretty annoying. If you really must make words up, stick to proper nouns and quit polluting the rest of the namespace.
I mean, you can use site-specific terms like "tweet" and "dent" if you like, but if the NYT wants to avoid product-specific terms, they should instruct their columnists to say "microblog" instead.
or
Using the generic term is kind of nice, too, as it doesn't prop-up the market leader's service or domain with free advertising.
-- Qubit
If some other service replaces Twitter, there's a good chance that using that service will also be referred to as "tweeting" since the term has become so well established, just as people refer to photocopying as "xeroxing" and to facial tissue as "kleenex". I don't care much for the word "tweet", but then I don't care much for Twitter either - its mostly a huge waste of time and an opportunity for obnoxious egotists to spam out details of their lives that hardly anyone should be interested in. But the word "tweet" is what people are using so its what journalists should use too.
..don't use the world "paleolithic".
This doesn't sound like an Onion story to me. The Times is trying to establish a professional standard of writing, and "tweet" is a silly slang phrase that very well could be obsolete next year if Twitter is no longer as popular. The submitter's quip at the end is trying to turn this into a social media versus old media fight, but the Times is right on this one.
for those who "tweet" is "twat".
Much more fitting.
Stop using those.
Mock the NYT memo all you want. 50 years from now nobody will have the slightest idea of what a "tweet" was without having to go look it up. Using sappy, faddish slang words like "tweet" to mean a "Twitter messaging service text" (or whatever) is doomed to speedy obsolescence. Go ahead, laugh. Tweet your hipster friends about it. But you'd better tattoo it on your arm as well so that you won't forget to tell your grandkids about it.
CG Pin-Ups?
The phrase "Google it" is used in common society as well, but who knows where the search engine giant will be 50 years from now?
Yes, it's a dictionary word, but one nice thing about these news institutions is that they provide a central archive of history and major events. Tweet is far more obscure and should be considered no different. Stick to professional language, please.
Of course, if somebody from the future looks back at newspapers from this time, they'll think that people like Lindsay Lohan were at the top of world-wide Monarchy....but that's beside the point.
It is sloppy journalism. Being able to read and understand what is written in a newspaper today 100 years from now when "twitter" is something of the distant past is just as important, if not more important then how readable it is to people today. Good journalism seeks to make what is written clear and understandable to anyone who has at least a "basic" understanding of the language. The lazy gits that piss and moan about having to make their wording clear need a lesson in what being a journalist is.
There is no story here. This is commonplace. Most organisations that deal in the written word maintain a style guide of prefered spellings, punctuation rules, and choices of words. This is business as usual.
I still don't get the point of badly re-implemented mobile IRC.
Actually forget this post.
This is just the old usage of twit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Tweetrolet"
But we favor established usage and ordinary words
Unless it's one of them new fangled Interweb words, apparently. Like it or not, "tweet" is the established and ordinary term for posting something to twitter.
Anyone of note still swapping news stories on Friendster? ICQ? Even myspace? Hey remember keyboard cat? Chat roulette?
Twitter has some longevity and will be around for 10 years at least, but I'll give it 3 more until its replaced by a new, better, fad. Actually scratch better. Twitter is inferior to almost every communication medium out there. Lets say, simpler, and by luck, more popular.
I was walking by some laptop users the other day and heard an ICQ "Incoming message" alarm. Lik
internet is anti-establishment, pro-change by its very core. if you cant join it, you lose it. dont worry - youll allow the word 'tweet' when it goes into merriam-webster in 1 to 2 years.
Read radical news here
It's jargon associated with a product. If someone were drinking mountain dew in a story, would it be reported that they "did the dew"? When anchors read comments off facebook (an idiot practice, but that's beside the point) do they say "Sooperstaar380 facebooked that the policy 'is balls'"? No, they say that "Sumers took sips from a mountain dew as we discussed the project", or "Sooperstaar380 posted the following on his facebook page."
Reporters have shown a tendency to get swept up in the enthusiasm surrounding twitter, but using the company's jargon in reportage is a tacit endorsement of the company, and frankly just reads as unprofessional.
I always just get flashbacks on how BBS'es were going to change the world. There was a dutch innovation program, quite serious, started to have lots of "bbs" parts. X but with a BBS. Seemed very exciting back then, when I was young.
Now I see X but with social media and think "meh".
Will twitter be big? Sure. Same as BBS, the home page and lets not forget RSS. Are we now supposed to blog on our BBS home page and twitter the RSS feed?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When a proper noun is used as a verb, should we still capitalize it? e.g. He Googles a lot of pornography. or What are you tweeting about?
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Tweet is not standard English
English has no normative standards body, but a few U.S. dictionaries define "tweet" as "a weak chirping sound".
I'll bet people are tweeting this story even now....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
So the NY Times is circling the drain and is about to go under and this is the kind of thing they worry about?
I'm in the profession of writing, and have to make these kinds of decisions often enough. It's not so much about being paleolithic, but simply looking at how widespread the use of the word is, and how established the word is in society. If it is mainly a geek-word, or a young-persons word, you wouldn't want to use it in a main stream article. If it had gained popularity throughout all generations, you still wouldn't want to use it unless it has become common for several years, proving establishment in the language. (Fads come and go.)
That said, a product or service name representing a wider, generic item is not very unusual in the American English language. Take "Kleenex" or "Clorox", both words that most likely do not make sense outside of America. (For those that live outside of the US, we use "Kleenex" when we refer to tissues, and "Clorox" when we refer to bleach. Yes, they are both specific product trademarks that have entered common usage.) In a more extreme case, in certain areas of the South you may even refer to any type of carbonated drink as a "Coke". So in a truly American way, it doesn't surprise me that NYT writers are using "Tweet" or "Google (verb)" in their writing. It is, however, a bit silly and short sighted, just like Kleenex and Clorox are (or at least were).
Had this guy been the arbitrator of new words back in cave man times we would still be all using the same 10 words! (me, you, hello, food, hungry, run, faster, sleepy, horny, headache).
"Tweet" will inevitably find its way into our official vernacular via its inclusion in the dictionary, following other such ridiculous nouns-turned-verbs like "Google", "Facebook", "friend", and "text".
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Not on your life. These drains on society should be secluded on an island like the criminals they are.
I'm on the fence about whether I approve or disapprove of using "Tweet" (though I dislike the word) by journalists. However, I think your examples of "flivver" and "flapper" are poor ones. "Flappers" have become rather iconic for the era, so I would not even blink at seeing that word pop up in old articles, especially regarding entertainment or popular culture.
"Flivver", on the other hand, is far more obscure. However it's obviously survived time, even if to a lesser degree than "flapper."
I predict that "tweet" has less than a flivver's chance of surviving a century.
The NYT Editor needs to get into the 21st century. A post to Twitter is a "Tweet".
I agree. People sound moronic, pretending 'tweet' is actually appropriate verb usage. I still cringe hearing people use 'google' as opposed to 'google search'
These newfangled internetty verbs will never last. Just google it if you don't believe me.
Good on Mr. Corbett. I've held the same view since Twitter came along. "Tweet," "tweeting," "tweeted" - all completely ridiculous words conjured up for no good reason. For that matter, however, I consider Twitter itself to be completely fucking ridiculous, so perhaps my bias runs deeper than simple grammar.
"... Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use..."
Nice snarky little jab there, but I find the notion of social networking sites supplanting established mass media and news to be as far-fetched as it is reprehensible. Maybe they work on a grassroots level as a bit of a 'complement' to traditional news, but other than that I see no indication whatsoever of them holding their own vis-à-vis peer review, integrity, fact-checking or social responsibility. If this does indeed happen (personally I believe the submitter was just grasping at straws), I'll hold even less hope for humanity in general than I already do, and that ain't much.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
If I were one of those columnists, I'd find every excuse I could to quote Rockin' Robin: "Love to hear the robin go tweet, tweet, tweet!"
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Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
A quick search on the NY Times site shows that word is used out of context: http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=googled&srchst=cse Google is not a verb. Thus one cannot be googling, have googled, or be planning to google in the future, yet the term is used in this way in several articles. While I understand where he's coming from, to single out Twitter and not other similarly retarded variations on websites or tech geek tools makes him just sound like an angry old man.
I was hoping that this was about the NYT no longer reporting *on* or referencing tweets and maybe leading the way back to actual journalism. Oh well.
Can you xerox something you tivo'ed or would you have a mess that you'd have to kleenex up?
The question is: Will the New York Times be here in 50 years?
My guess is no. It may not even last ten.
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Technology is wonderful, and we should all embrace it. Twitter, Facebook, etc. But talking like a 16 year old is another. Let's not lose our language.
To the contrary. The New York Times is one of the very few papers that even has a fighting chance of staying afloat. You can't really find better journalism anywhere. Joe Bloggs isn't going to have confidential wiretapping memos leaked to him anytime soon, and he definitely won't risk jailtime for it.
I know I'll continue my subscription for the foreseeable future, as will most of the people I know.
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There's time and then there's internet time.
Your kids may learn about T-Rex, but will they know that "You've got mail!" referred to a different kind of dinosaur that once roamed the earth?
From TFA: One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to "tweets" or "tweeting.”
"tweet" is simply not yet well-known enough. It is a term only a specific group of people knows and uses, those who regularly use Twitter. Would your mother know what the word "tweet" means, apart from the sound a bird makes? Probably not. Would she want to read that word in an article then, not knowing what it means? Probably not. While this might be shocking news to some, Twitter is not yet well-known enough to make it and the weird words surrounding it mainstream knowledge. And that's why any self-respecting journalist should not use the word "tweet" - if your readers are "normal" people, then you should write in such a way that normal people can understand you. On a side note, I know Twitter and use it, and I never used the word "tweet" so far (mainly because I think it sounds stupid when somebody uses it, I just say "I put that on Twitter").
I don't see what's wrong with using the word tweet. I mean, I googled it and it does appear in wikipedia. Besides, it's not such a big news story anyway, I mean, it's not even slashdotted!
for its users, though.
That is an excellent example of where using jargon is valid. Everyone reading this site is a geek and understand exactly what you said. The NYT audience is not that technologically savvy. Walk into your local bridge club and say the same statement. I bet you would get a lot of blank looks.
And how do I tweet in this thing?
But... the future refused to change.
Twit.
http://www.belikeminded.com/2010/06/pete-proofreader.html
"After all, he points out, ' ... another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion.' Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use."
That’s a false dichotomy. I’m very sure that both will happen. While working hard (and pointlessly) to replace the other. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Please ban the word "blog". Please, you f---ing retards. Just because you think you were the first one to discover the Internet in 2003/4/5/whenever and you needed something to call it, doesn't mean you can call it a blog.
The greatest way for anyone to indicate their noobieness/stupidity when it comes to the Internet is to use the word "blog" or any derivative of.
Tweet sounds gay.
This isn't that big a deal.
LOL, check out the picture the article greets you. Yeah, maybe they'll have to use a heavily armored guy with a big gun to protect Old Media...
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays
Everyone else can eat a bag of dicks. Twitter is, to me, a one-liner joke delivery mechanism.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
You are all stupid idiots - who give a @$%# about a word - GET A LIFE.
NYT has one of the, if not the, widest distributions in the country (WSJ or UST might be more, but it's 2010 and I don't really give enough of a fsck about dinosaurs to look it up). For them to stop using a five-letter verb that is not just the term accepted by the creator of a product but already an English word in favour of the wasted ink of a ten- or thirteen-letter phrase indicates that either they don't care about the wasted ink on all nine papers they sell or else print media's the next bailout.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
Perhaps in the near future we'll have translation engines that don't go from language to language, but rather from era to era.
The English that Shakespeare wrote in is quite different from today's English, which will likely be different from English in 2100 CE.
Brick and morter stores are turning to blogs and tweets to get new business, trading schwag for likes and diggs. Even business owners are getting in on the act, by friending their customers and tagging them in pictures.
Just imagine trying to read something like that in another fifty years.
-David
I hereby sentence you to death by... uh hu uh huhu.. death by.. uh hu uh.. saw off his tweeter! [sound of chainsaw revving]
This thread needed a LISP joke.
IRC is built around channels and PMs.
Twitter can do that, or it can be publish/subscribe, for which there isn't (AFAIK) an IRC analogue.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Good job!
While I use Twitter all the time, I personally hate the word "tweet". That being said, that is a bad reason to ban the use of a word.
However, Mr. Corbett does give very good reasons to ban it in a paper for general audience. It is certainly not understandable to the many, many people who know very little about Twitter, it's a neologism used for a specific service that does not apply to other similar services, and, in the future when Twitter is dead and gone or transformed into something entirely different, historical articles that use the word "tweet" will seem either extremely dated or incomprehensible to future audiences. So, good job, Mr. Corbett!
In 20 years, when people are going over the archive they are going to run across this strange verb called "tweet" that means nothing to them.
Hell, could be as little as 5.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
"Post", as in the mail, a stick of wood, or the act of attaching a piece of paper to a tree or wall, is standard English.
"Post", as in something to do with the Internet, is NOT standard English.
Nor is the inter-net itself, unless you mean a bunch of ropes tied into a net and strung between, say, some fishing trawlers.
Language evolves. The only point of contention here is whether Twitter will be gone in five years.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As an archaeologist, the context in which he uses the term "paleolithic" greatly bothers me. Can I demand that he use an alternative word?
"Archaic" is out of the question, too.
And if the online social media editors were in fact ready to "elbow paleolithic media into oblivion" they might have used the more appropriate phrase "Cretaceous Extinction".
Dinosaurs trump hubris.
Just call them "Twit alerts"
What's funny is that WAY more people use Twitter on a daily basis than have ever looked at the NYT.
Uh no. Let me squirt over some historical data do you. The Ny times has seen lots of new words come and go.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...then perhaps he should stop using words like paleolithic.
I think that Twitter or Twitter users have the linguistic right to choose the word that means to use the service. Considering the existing standard grammatical relationship between the words, any English speaker reading about Twitter as a company name would be able to deduce the in context definition of the word tweet.
Further, it becomes cumbersome to use the editor's suggested alternatives throughout an article heavily covering Twitter.
Hey, how's it going?
A few years back, we would have ridiculed a debate over "computer message" or "electronic mail" instead of email. Tweet is in the cultural lexicon. It's the commonly used word for "message sent via Twitter." Don't worry, though....we'll change after Apple buys Twitter. After that, we'll say "I sent him a Bite on my iPad."
New York Times folks are off their rocker. Subscription cancelled.
Tweet refers to a specific action users take on twitter, that involves creating text that is readable by other users through apps that utilize the twitter API.
Tweets, Retweets, and private tweets are all different kinds of things, and none of them are person to person messages like email.
Sending a tweet is not called 'posting an update' or sending a status update. "Status updates" are a Facebook thing.
It's not called 'sending a message'. That's an e-mail thing.
It's not called 'posting a message'. That's a forum thing.
It's not called 'using twitter'. Using twitter in no way implies you sent a tweet.
Tweetle tweetle dumb.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
And grandparent, too! You win this thread!
I have visited NYC a few times now and I sincerely hope you don't consider the native speech there to be representative of proper American English. It's a weird and extremely grating nasal abomination punctuated by such erudite phrases as "you douchebag, ya scumbag".
Picking that region and main newspaper for some "lesson" in proper speech is weird. It's completely alien to the rest of the nation. It really should be its own city state, I would be thrilled if they removed themselves from the US actually, or they were asked to just leave, and take their newspapers and so called financial "industry"-the white shoe boys gangster mafia-with them.
The New York Times does not publish in the dialect(s) of the common citizens of that New York City. It has been regarded as a "paper of record" for most of its existence and is more formal about adhering to an academic writing style than most other newspapers.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. ... Don't try to kodak him.
And if you do, for god's sake don't Xerox the prints!
This entire situation is not a matter of "do people understand what we're saying?"
As a journalist working for major newspaper, I disagree: the point of not using 'tweet' is to make text more comprehensible. Twitter is relatively new thing. Majority of layman readers won't know it even exists. The real problem is how to explain Twitter in just one or two words, Should I write 'social media service Twitter' or 'microblog service Twitter' or what?
I remember when Slashdot was the cutting edge for technology and technology news, and the majority of posters, all into their own things, were pretty accepting of new tech. Now the vast majority of the comments here sound like the "get off my lawn" patrol.
Is Twitter new and very possibly a passing fad? Sure. Maybe it'll stick around, maybe it won't. I find it useful for keeping up with authors and companies I like, but not everyone's into the microblogging format. But to listen to most of you, it's some newfangled horseless carriage that you don't understand. You don't have to like it, but don't be jealous that it's more popular than your favorite flavor of Linux this week.
I also remember these exact same discussions about the term "blog" - it's stupid, it doesn't mean anything, it'll never catch on, etc. I'm sure in 30 years some things will have stuck, while others will sound dated. But watch any movie from the 40s or 50s. Read popular lit of any past decade. It's full of terms you don't hear anymore.
If you can, check out the newspapers from the 30s and 40s - it's full of popular language that we cringe at today (especially when referring to minorities, but also in general usage). I get to do quite a bit of that for my job. Journalism's golden age, it was not.
So he is banning usage of words that are less than couple of years old. I guess, they should also ban news that are less than couple of days old as well. Idiots.
I agree with you, and also find that most of the people who "hate" or "can't stand" twitter are all people who either have never used it in their life, or are not using it properly.
They also tend to be the same people who "hate" or "can't stand" *anything* when first released, then become reluctant adopters, then eventually embrace it.
They are basically the opposite group of early adopters, they are the technological equivalent of grumpy old "get off my lawn" men.
These same people who railed and whined and moaned about "Web 2.0" and how annoying AJAX and dynamic websites were back in '03, and now all have GMail as their primary email account.
You're following Stephen Fry, aren't you?
HAND.
Meh
Jules is trying, Ringo. He's trying real hard to be the shepherd. But this whole Twitter-lution thing is really getting to him. All this talk of "tweeple" and "twiggits" and "tweekends" is unfamiliar to him. It makes him nervous. And when he gets nervous, he gets scared. And when he gets scared... that's when mother 'effers accidentally get shot.
But he's really twying-- Oh, damn, you hear that? Now you made him twalk like a jerk. There it is again! That's the last straw!
Go ahead, say "tweet" again! He dares you. No, he double dares you -- say "tweet" one more time! Because the truth is, you're the tweak and he's the twyranny of evil-- Argh!!!
I always thought "Using Twitter" was a euphemism for defecation. Just ask Gabe.
While this sounds like it could as well be an Onion story, the memo is being widely reported.
From the headline alone, I understood the reasons why the editor of the NYT would want to ban the word "tweet". Yet, it's listed as absurd by the Slash editor.
I was going to send a complaint to the editors, but it looks like their page got Slashdotted.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
This can't possibly be from The Onion, because it doesn't reiterate each point five times in an attempt to fill up enough space for a scroll bar. "Onion stories often repeat themselves," says Steve Hannah, "it's just the best way to make room for ads." He added, "making the redundant parts into quotes from relevant people is a good way to make this appear excusable."
Mike McAvoy said the same thing.
My primary language is Spanish, my secondary language used to be French when I was little, but I can hardly speak it now, my third language is English. I also speak a bit of Portuguese, and some Latin and Esperanto. I love learning new languages. And yet, the language I love the most, the one I wanted to learn above every other language is German. I live in Argentina (our language is Spanish), and I've been searching around for a school where I can learn German through English. I feel very comfortable with English, and I just think it would be easier to learn German from another Saxon language like English, just like it would be easier to learn French from another Latin language like Spanish. I haven't had any luck yet. Anyway, I hate the way English has been corrupting other languages. I absolutely agree with using words in other languages when there is no real word for it in your own language, or when using the original word just transmits something that the word in your language doesn't, or because of historical reasons (for example, we all use the German word Kernel, even when there are perfectly good words with the same meaning in every language). But the marketing use of English all around the world to replace perfectly good words in native languages just drives me nuts. It bothers me even more in certain languages (for instance, German). A language with such a fucking amazing sound as Ach and the ability to make up words on the fly shouldn't borrow words from any other language. Same thing happens to me on Spanish, specially when they borrow verbs and misuse them. Spanish has a very complex and rich verb conjugation, and using 'static' verbs (AKA verbs with just a few inflections) is just awful. /rant
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Stupid people and the stupid and irrelevant companies they work for are always good fun to watch and get laughs from. Like the NYT.
The word "tweet" is culture-specific slang so yes, it shouldn't be used in the context of serious news, except to illustrate the term itself. It's the tech-culture equivalent of Seinlanguage.
it would be missed by few, and forgotten completely in days. Ok, that's all I've got to say about it.
I find it amazing these "journalists" (sic) have time to foist opinion about newfangled slang e-verbs folks have created out of the necessity of brevity, when there other problems in the world.
Like oh say, the possibility of doomsday in New York if the government shut's down.
It would be far more in the public interest if these "journalists" (sic) could start using words like
Broken Oath of office
Corruption
Bribes
Treason
Bankrupt Government
coup
Of course it could simply a NYT ego dick measuring contest because not many folks go "NYT-ing" anymore. Gee I wonder why.
Reporters were required to use the word "homosexual" in articles about them, even in the early years of AIDS.
I presume there are other areas where the NYT is years behind slang usage.