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New York Times Bans Use of Word "Tweet"

Posted by timothy on from the seems-fair-enough dept.

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.

4 of 426 comments (clear)

  1. A weak chirping sound by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tweet is not standard English

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

    1. Re:A weak chirping sound by vegiVamp · · Score: 3, Informative

      "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.

      --
      What a depressingly stupid machine.
  2. Re:Gained respect for NYT by digitig · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
  3. Re:Gained respect for NYT by oatworm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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".