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.

Comments

Re:He has a point

[peacefinder]

Imagine imagine imagine me using preview!

Imagine the ability to edit comments! Imagine the ability to post a second one immediately!

A weak chirping sound

[tepples]

Tweet is not standard English

English has no normative standards body, but a few U.S. dictionaries define "tweet" as "a weak chirping sound".

Re:A weak chirping sound

[Anonymous Coward]

E-mail is just a shortening of "electronic mail," which is hardly a total invention. And as we drove horses or mules, so we drove cars (a word itself derived from the Latin for "chariot"). Though funny, your straw man is wide of the mark. Twitter is a single website, and doesn't need its own verb.

A better analogy would be referring to "driving" as "Fording," or perhaps "e-mails" as "AOL-grams." Ugh.

Re:A weak chirping sound

[vegiVamp]

"To drive" is to give direction to something, so that it moves that way - as has been used from way before there were motorised vehicles: shepherds used to drive flocks of sheep, and so on.

"e-mail" is merely a shorthand for "electronic mail", which is a pretty apt name for the technology. I imagine that the NYT did use the full phrase until such a time that most of it's readers could reasonably be expected to know the shorthand form.

I fail to see what you're getting at, here.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[digitig]

Tweet is not standard English, at least not yet.

According to the Complete Oxford English Dictionary:
"tweet, n. and int. An imitation of the note of a small bird. Also repeated."
"Hence tweet v. trans., to utter in this way, to twitter; also transf." [my emphasis]
It's been standard English since the middle of the 19th century. With variant spellings it goes back at least as far as the 16th century.

Re:How about google...

[wisnoskij]

The verb google has already been added the new Merriam-Webster dictionary.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google

your slow adoption of words make you sounds like a angry old man.

Words change and are created all the time, just because google was not a word when you were a kid and it sounds weird to you does not mean that to most 20 somethings it is not as much a part of the language and as professional to use as any other word.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[oatworm]

Many languages have official government-sanctioned boards that determine what's "in" and what's "out", similar to a standardization board (IEEE or something similar). German, for example, has the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, which helped orchestrate the Spelling Reform of 1996. English, meanwhile, is one of the few major languages with no central regulatory body in charge of it for a variety of reasons, chief among which being that the US wouldn't (heck, already doesn't) recognize British "English" as official and vice-versa.

The cool part about English's decentralization is that it can adapt very quickly; the bad part, of course, is that it does adapt very quickly and frequently without thought. It's sort of like the difference between C++, where it takes over a decade to make any significant changes, and BASIC, which has several dialects, most of which are virtually indecipherable to one another, and changes according to the needs of whomever wishes to claim they "speak BASIC".

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the definition: "to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters", it is in fact quite correct to use "tweet" in reference to "Twitter" in this case.

Re:Thank God

[Antisyzygy]

I am very happy this happened. Twitter is for narcissistic people to spout off meaningless snippets of their unimpressive lives. I thought people would have had enough of it from Facebook or Myspace, but apparently people need an even more frequent dose of bullshit.

Re:Thank God

[linzeal]

It is most useful for finding the latest updates on world events, everything else is really just vanity or advertisinng media.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[guyminuslife]

I just spent ten minutes of my life tracking down the source of that unattributed quote.

So if you have less free time than me (and if so, why are you on Slashdot?), it's misquoted, and it's this guy.

Re:Thank God

[bobcat7677]

"Twitter" is not a universally accepted and standardized form of communication like a telephone or fax machine. Therefore it should not be treated the same by a news person. The correct form would be "President Obama earlier today published a statement addressing corruption allegations via the "Twitter" internet social networking service. This would allow anyone not familiar with Twitter to easily understand basically what occurred (including future historians who may not not know what Twitter is without referencing other historical materials to find out).