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

Thank God

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone had to do it.

Re:Thank God

[Nick Fel]

Amen. I'm sick of the media fawning over Twitter. If I wanted to know what AnonymousPunter1983 thought, I'd go down the pub and ask my friends. Give me proper news and analysis, not regurgitated social network content.

Re:Thank God

[interkin3tic]

Now if only we could get them to ban reporting on twitter whatsoever, that would be real progress.

Re:Thank God

[Grishnakh]

Agreed. I don't even use Twitter, but I do use LinkedIn, and some moron there just had to copy a Twitter post from one of her friends saying "taking the kids to [some event]". Who cares?

Re:Thank God

[Vamman]

F thank you!

Re:Thank God

[Allicorn]

Agree. Well done NYT!

There is nothing so unique about posting text on a twitter.com page that makes it substantially different from posting text on a personal website, forum, or anywhere else.

It doesn't need a verb. Its marketing department would love you to adopt their suggested verb though, and use it here, there and everywhere.

Re:Thank God

[jhoegl]

Kiddie watchers and robbers care. At least THEY "thought of the children".

Re:Thank God

[noidentity]

What do you and everyone in this thread have against talking about the weak chirping sound that a young small bird makes?!?

Re:Thank God

[foniksonik]

What's funny is that WAY more people use Twitter on a daily basis than have ever looked at the NYT.

As far as Quality News. Heh. NYT isn't really holding up that well. I rarely see anything there I haven't already read about at the primary source (in more detail and less bias).

Re:Thank God

[Pharmboy]

I setup a Twitter account, and 5 minutes later realized that I don't care about the minutia of other people's day, nor do I expect them to care about mine. Facebook is fine, I can add photos and updates when I feel like it (most of my family lives half a country away), and catch up with old school chums from the 70s/80s, but tweets? Too trivial.

As to the issue at hand, I would agree that a professional news organization shouldn't use the word "tweet" as a verb. They might as well use words like "kewl" and "133+", or perhaps ROFLMAO, LOL, OMG and :o) while they are at it.

Re:Thank God

[foniksonik]

Do you also care less about accurate description of a news source. If it came as an interview over satellite phone would yo rather they said " I talked to " witness A in Kabul or " I spoke over satellite phone " to Witness A who was in Kabul.

Same here. I'd the news source is "Pres. Obama sent out a tweet addressing accusations of corruption in the National Mineral Management Dept. " or Pres Obama announced it.

Re:Thank God

[Cylix]

President Obama earlier today sent out a tweet concerning corruption allegations, "Those bitches be mad."

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

[fortapocalypse]

But what will the birds say?

Re:Thank God

[Starayo]

I use twitter, not so much for tweeting as for following others. I find twitter is very useful - not for following friends and family, but for following certain companies, people etc who give small bites of useful/interesting information that lends itself well to the microblogging format.

Re:Thank God

[nospam007]

We've had Newsletters for >30 years now.

I'm an old fart but I receive my newsletters pushed on my cell just like the twits their tweets, only there is no size limitation.

So I really don't see what all this is about, the kids using a newsserver with a size limit is the next new thing since Second Life?

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:Thank God

[martin-boundary]

They shouldn't use the verb "google" either, for that matter (cue google fanboi contingent stage left).

Re:Thank God

[amRadioHed]

Right on! RT @Antisyzgy: 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

[Alioth]

I just wish "blogosphere" would fall into disuse. It's a terrible word, and encapsulates everything wrong with buzzword-seeking-management speak and about breathlessly jumping on the most recent bandwagon.

Re:Thank God

[tyrione]

Agreed. I don't even use Twitter, but I do use LinkedIn, and some moron there just had to copy a Twitter post from one of her friends saying "taking the kids to [some event]". Who cares?

Then be sure not to broadcast frivolous chit chat and keep to professional news, business contacts, events planning, etc.

Re:Thank God

[sourcerror]

100 years later it might be a sociological goldmine.

Re:Thank God

[Nikker]

That's very true. Shouldn't be hard to archive at least. It would be like giving an entire civilization a psychiatric examination. Then at least we can figure out what went so horribly wrong.

Re:Thank God

[beh]

Look at other languages, and you will see the kind of damage this does - take German for example:

German has already taken on a lot of 'new' words from English, like 'computer' for example - though in this particular case, the German word 'Rechner' for it still survives. 'Server' though does not have a counterpart in our language. For a 'computer' I'm absolutely fine with that, as we didn't have this kind of machinery before its invention.
But, in order to appeal more to younger Germans, a lot of cosmetics have also been re-labelled - 'eye shadowr' instead of 'lidschatten' - but in this case for absolutely the same product, so the 'new' words doesn't add anything at all, apart from maybe sound a bit more 'worldly' and 'exotic' as it isn't our language. This is fine for younger Germans, but I did hear my mother complaining the other day, that she can't find the things she's used to anymore - like Lidschatten. She sees all those English labels now, and simply doesn't assume it's the same thing any more, as they completely ditched the German word from it, and from the labels attached to it.

And this way, older Germans are slowly being 'ignored' in terms of language.

In some companies, managers now more often speak of '(future) challenges' (in the midst of a German sentence), the German words '(künftige) Herausforderungen'. And they simply feel like they're over and above everyone by being able to use such words - they simply don't get that the German words for this mean absolutely the same - but they might sound a little less 'cool' to the managers own ears. To one manager I tried to bring this across by telling him somehting in English, but replacing all the English words he would normally use in his German, with their 'old' German counterparts - he thought it sounded stupid (which it did) - but completely failed to see that his German interlaced with English words would sound exactly as stupid - the only difference being that I did it for the 'comedic' effect, and he does it because he feels it's the only way of being taken serious.

Later I found, if you put a single word in English as opposed to German, sometimes people start attaching far more weight to that one word - why else would the person saying it have bothered to put an English word there - the English word almost gets slang status through this.

So, yes, tweeting isn't really anything else than writing - just in another medium, just like you write by fax or mail, or speak on the phone (Or when did you last hear "Auntie Mary phoned 'Hi'?' or 'Grandpa mailed 'How are you?'?

Tweeting should just go...

Re:Thank God

[commodore64_love]

You ought to watch a Hindi (Indian) movie sometime. They'll switch back-and-forth between their own language and English fluently. It's creating a strange amalgam of two languages. I imagine England in the 1100s was much the same way, with people flipping back-and-forth between the native Anglish and the ruling Frankish languages. Now today we have a language whose originating words are half English and half French.

As for "tweet" and "google" I think they should be classified as slang and avoided for use in writing. Maybe in 50 years the word will be standard but more likely it will fall out of style, like most slang words do.

Re:Thank God

[Patch86]

"Alice tweeted about the big project..."
"Alice phoned about the big project..."
"Alice faxed about the big project..."

I'm not sure I see the pig problem. Don't get me wrong, I find Twitter itself frivolous and irritating. But I don't really see there being a big linguistics problem with the word "tweet" in it's current usage.

Re:Thank God

[SageMusings]

Rather than thinking about it terms of linguistic erosion, you should be pleased that German shows every sign of being a living, changing language. This hold true for many languages; even English takes on a tremendous amount of loan words from other tongues. I have always viewed this as a positive attribute.

Indeed, efforts to prevent the natural evolution of a language leads to ... French, I suppose.

No insult to the French but the Govt should not try to guide the growth of the language.

Re:Thank God

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Well, I'd like to thank the times editors, and not god, because the times editors, unlike god, exist and had something to do with this.

If I had to report on something I would say that it was "published online using the tweeter.com service" or something like that. Taking brands and using them with such ubiquity is an awful practice. Specially when we are talking about stuff as retarded as tweeter/facebook or any of the other "social networks".

Re:Thank God

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Of course they shouldn't use "to google". We all know the proper verb is "to grep" ;)

Re:Thank God

[beh]

Yes, you hear 'someone faxed about this' - but if you hear how CNN and other places use it, you hear 'Our viewer Jack tweeted: Me too!' (or whatever)... ...literally, as a drop in replacement for wrote.

The problem is, that us 'technophiles' here might know what the word means, but for a vast number of the people out there - the word might mean next to nothing.

When programmable computers were developed, bringing in the word computers made sense for it, as it was something new, something that didn't really have much meaning about it. A lot of NY Times readers are probably not that technophile as you and I may be.

Re:Thank God

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Are you kidding me? French is one of the most beautiful, rich and complex languages in the world. Polluting it with English is a crime.

Re:Thank God

[beh]

I am thankful that the language is living and even evolving - but needless change is still needless. Introducing the word 'tweeting' does not really add much meaning to the language. A message posted as a tweet is not inherently worth more (or less), just by virtue of being transmitted via twitter.

The words computer or PC means something that you couldn't easily use a single pre-existing word for.

Re the French - it's not that the government is trying to guide the growth of the language, but rather trying to control or restrict -- with I find worse.

So, recap: Bringing in a new word which replaces something that before you would have had to describe in a lot of other words - that makes sense.
Replacing an existing word for no big gain does not make much sense and does not do language a favour.

I need to see whether I will find it again - but I do remember reading something about the danger of English breaking apart because it's absorbing way too many words from way too many different languages and cultures, in too short a time. This might leads to rifts in English being 'different' in different areas (and by different I mean well beyond simple differences in local dialects). This might end up in English becoming LESS of an international language that promotes understanding.

Re:Thank God

[maxwell demon]

Well, there is truth to both sides. Keeping a language static would be no good. There have been times where people objected to too much French in the German language. A lot of those words have fallen out of use, but some are still used today, and I don't think you'll find many people who consider that a problem.

On the other hand, the use of English just to sound "modern" is so large that it indeed is sort of a problem. A lot of perfect, unproblematic German words get replaced by English words for no good reason.

Re:Thank God

[ClosedSource]

Or it might just be more "noise" that researchers have to sift through to find useful information.

Re:Thank God

[The Archon V2.0]

I setup a Twitter account, and 5 minutes later realized that I don't care about the minutia of other people's day, nor do I expect them to care about mine.

I made one so someone wouldn't grab the name ahead of me. My name is rare but not unique, so I wind up getting phone calls and e-mails from my denser relations asking who the girl I keep talking about is and how my golfing vacation last month was and when did I take up golf and how did I drive for two days straight without a car?

I think I used my Twitter account once to tell a guy his e-mail server was down. Provided a handy alternate means of communication in that instance, I'll say.

Re:Thank God

[markimusk]

yeah, mostly in Quebec.

Re:Thank God

[ricosalomar]

What an awesome post, thanks. But I just wanted to add, it goes both ways, only just a little, I suppose. Grep some English sentences that have "zeitgeist" in them.

Re:Thank God

[Grishnakh]

In some companies, managers now more often speak of '(future) challenges' (in the midst of a German sentence), the German words '(künftige) Herausforderungen'. And they simply feel like they're over and above everyone by being able to use such words - they simply don't get that the German words for this mean absolutely the same - but they might sound a little less 'cool' to the managers own ears.

That's obnoxious, but it's not something unique to Germany. Managers here in the USA do the exact same thing, and it's really annoying, except it's all in English (sort of). They have their own idiotic "manager-speak", with all kinds of stupid terms like "gaining traction", "adding value", and worst of all, "empowerment". They speak this weird dialect of English in status meetings and expect all us non-managers to understand their gibberish, and think they sound really important, even though they just sound like jerks. It sounds like you have your own version of manager-speak over there, except that they try to puff themselves up with sprinkled English words.

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).

Re:Thank God

[YourExperiment]

Agreed. I don't even use LinkedIn, but I do use SlashDot, and some moron there just had to copy a LinkedIn post from one of his friends saying "taking the kids to [some event]". Who cares?

Gained respect for NYT

[Junta]

I cringe every time I hear the word 'tweet'.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[vikstar]

Phil Corbett groks journalism.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The point of the original poster seems to be "Gee, look how silly NYT is being." But the NYT is right. Tweet is not standard English, at least not yet.

But then (and I don't care if it dismays the marketing departments), I don't "google" either, I do a web search, I don't use "Kleenex," I use facial tissue, and I don't "Xerox," I copy. I guess I don't accept blatant attempts to commercialize generic English terms. And why should anyone?

--This message brought to you by Kraft Macaroni and Cheese (R). It's the cheesiest (TM).

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[girlintraining]

I cringe every time I hear the word 'tweet'.

I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it. This is why when it comes to english, I prefer to be practical: If it's understandable by everyone involved, it is "good" language. If nobody understands it, it is "bad" language. Whether the words are on the approved list or not is pedantic and not useful.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah. Not only that, but anyone (eg: the submitter) who thinks that Twitter is in any way pushing the NYT into obsolescence is insane. Twitter is inane and stupid, the NYT is actual, you know, news.

Other variations on news may or may not be making the NYT obsolete, but Twitter has not a damn thing to do with it.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[TomXP411]

Heck, I'm still annoyed at "website". When did those two words merge?

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[jimbolauski]

The hyphen was removed in 2000 it was part of the fix for the y2k bug.

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:Gained respect for NYT

[M. Baranczak]

Heck, I'm still annoyed at "website".

I'm still annoyed at "blog". But "blog" and "website" describe things for which there is no other word, so I'd say they're valid. Twitter, on the other hand, is just a blog with a ridiculously small size limit, so there's no good reason to make up a new verb for it.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Anonymous Coward]

"English doesn't borrow words from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them unconscious, and rifles through their pockets for loose grammar." Still Twitter is for twits that think we care about the minutiae of their lives.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Sky-217]

I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it.

I agree it's a language of borrowed words, but it doesn't seem as obvious to me that English developed much differently than most other languages. I am not a linguist (IANAL?), so I don't know, but maybe you have an example of another widely spoken language where "rule" development was a priority when it was gaining usage?

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Verunks]

Yeah. Not only that, but anyone (eg: the submitter) who thinks that Twitter is in any way pushing the NYT into obsolescence is insane. Twitter is inane and stupid, the NYT is actual, you know, news.

Other variations on news may or may not be making the NYT obsolete, but Twitter has not a damn thing to do with it.

I actually find twitter very useful at least in the way I use it, I do follow game developers twitters like http://twitter.com/OfficialBFBC2 to get almost realtime news, and you can even ask something directly to them and get an answer sometimes, things like this were unthinkable just a few years ago
of course this is way different than saying that twitter will replace NYT, but still it's not something "insane and stupid"

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[nine-times]

I agree. I still can't get used to the word "blog" and get a bit annoyed at "infographic". I would say that i generally don't like neologisms, but I'm not sure I like the word "neologism".

More generally, I'd like to see an attempt to categorize and name these new forms of communication and turn them into open standards. To me, a "tweet" isn't meaningfully different from a Google "buzz" or a Facebook status update. Let's settle on a name, devise standard protocols, and quit tying ourselves to particular providers.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[abigor]

You obviously only speak English. If you spoke French, you'd know that "le weekend" is here.

All languages borrow words, and to think English is some special degenerate case is just self-loathing nonsense.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[imakemusic]

Inane, not insane.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[ChunderDownunder]

Neology is a religion centered around a make-believe Messiah in a highly successful sci-fi trilogy by the Wachowski brothers.

As for 'neologism', well that's just some obnoxious term Wikipedia uses, as parodied by the recent malamanteau xkcd entry.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Moridineas]

I cringe everytime I hear english. It's the language of borrowed words, and I'm pretty sure the rules for it were invented a lot later, when people realized they might have to teach it.

Here, you're largely right. Many rules and normative practices WERE invented relatively recently. For instance, the rule to never split infinitives (hah) came into being because you don't split infinitives in Latin, and Latin is the perfect language (of course infinitives in Latin are a single word, so it's not wonder they can't be split!). I believe another example is the world "island" -- why the "s" ?? It's totally unpronounced? Well, the spelling was modified to look more like Franco-Latin as opposed to the english pronunciation...

This is why when it comes to english, I prefer to be practical: If it's understandable by everyone involved, it is "good" language. If nobody understands it, it is "bad" language. Whether the words are on the approved list or not is pedantic and not useful.

Here you're (imho) wrong. Your practical rule may make sense to you, but around the world there are billions of English speakers. It's far and away the most spoken language. I do NOT mean native speakers, I mean people who have learned some level of English. This is a critical distinction for things like "Spanglish," "Hinglish," "Engrish" and so on. What you and I may easily understand, somebody else may not. Hell, people from the backwoods of Minnesota and somebody from an isolated holler in Appalachia vs a inner-city Brooklynite already have a different enough starting base!

The point of rules and standard words is to create some standard that millions of people can use and expect (or hope!) to be understood.

This is not to say that languages cannot and should not evolve, just that I don't think your point is correct.

On the actual topic of the article, I hate twitter and tweet, and am more than glad to see a big-name source of journalism axe the term twitter! I think it's a very fair point that in one, or two, or ten years there's an incredibly high chance people won't be using twitter. Not to mention, I see people around here complain about "Xeroxing" things all the time :-p Anyway, think about reading something about the internet from 1996 or so that might use terms... "After I opened Mozilla was altavistaing the topic, i got ICQed and knew something strange was going on"

Would anybody today who DIDN'T use the Internet then (ie, the vast majority of people) understand what the heck those words meant?

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Grishnakh]

"Tweet", as in something that birds do, is indeed standard English, just like "meow" and "woof".

"Tweet", as in something to do with internet posts, is NOT standard English. It's just a stupid fad that will be forgotten in 5 years.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hurricane78]

Es ist us, ze Germans!
It’s unsere WUNDABAR revenge, for die Deppenleerzeichen!
Zey spread like wir did back zen! Now we are kämpfen back like you did!
VERBOTEN!
JAHAHA!

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

[Runaway1956]

I've thought of clicking lots of things - but your NAME?!? Sounds kinky. Hell, I'll try (almost) anything once!

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:Gained respect for NYT

[TheABomb]

You have a Woof on line 1.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[biobogonics]

I cringe every time I hear the word 'tweet'.

I have to restrain myself from calling the "tweeters" twats.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[biobogonics]

I cringe every time I hear the word 'tweet'.

I cringe whenever Slashdot blows up whenever I try to post.

When I hear the word "Twitter" or "Tweet", on the other hand, the first word that comes to mind is "twat".

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[tool462]

Exactly. They had to make up for the extra storage required for the new four digits years, so they took hyphens out of all internet related buzz words.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[gaboalonso]

I believe another example is the world "island" -- why the "s" ?? It's totally unpronounced? Well, the spelling was modified to look more like Franco-Latin as opposed to the english pronunciation...

Actually, Island is pronounced without an 'S' to differentiate the word from the word Iceland, the country (which, by the way, is written as 'Ísland' or 'Islandia' in other countries, and is actually an island).

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Scarred Intellect]

Shouldn't tweets on TWITter be called twits, anyway?

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[the phantom]

Why the hate for neologism? Wikipedia may have an obsession with it, but it is a perfectly cromulent English word, which as been with use since 1803 according to Merriam-Webster, or since 1772 according to the venerable OED.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Antisyzygy]

Englishes origins was as a Germanic language. Many of its words are borrowed from Latin, as are the majority of western European languages. Still many are borrowed from French during the time when the Normans conquered and ruled over England. To say English is a language of borrowed words with arbitrary rules is not entirely fair. If English is a borrowed hodgepodge then try learning Japanese.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Antisyzygy]

I applaud your defense of rationality.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Antisyzygy]

Im pretty sure Island was a word before Iceland was.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[gaboalonso]

Im pretty sure Island was a word before Iceland was.

Probably then, the S was pronounced.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[rolfwind]

English being borrowed is more a problem when it comes it inconsistent spellings and pronunciations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#.22Ough.22_words

        * though: /o/ as in toe; (other examples: dough)
        * tough: /f/ as in cuff; (other examples: rough, enough)
        * cough: /f/ as in off; (other examples: Gough (name))
        * hiccough (a now uncommon variant of hiccup): /p/ as in up; (unique)
        * plough: /a/ as in cow; (other examples: sough, drought, and the name Doughty)
        * through: /u/ as in threw;
        * nought: // as in caught. (other examples: ought, sought, thought, brought

As a native English speaker, I still have enough problems with ie and ei and words and have to think when I spell words like receive and something like ancient. Mostly spelled correctly because of my spelling correction. And words like tongue have their origins where?

So many borrowed words, whether it's from German, Welsh, France, etcetera should have reconfigured spelling to follow English pronunciation. You point out Japanese but because they don't have latin alphabet, everything they borrow is put into Katakana (following pronunciation) and "japanized" rather than their language make an exception for the spelling of a borrowed word.

Although German is getting rather bastardized with borrowed terms (team imo should be germanized into Tiem), it does have a more consistency in spelling overall.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[LoverOfJoy]

I clicked on your name because I was curious too. I skimmed through some posts and looked around but couldn't find any answers. I'm not so interested as to actually take the time to read every post you've made, though.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Graymalkin]

I do follow game developers twitters like http://twitter.com/OfficialBFBC2 [twitter.com] to get almost realtime news, and you can even ask something directly to them and get an answer sometimes, things like this were unthinkable just a few years ago

Uh...how few is a few? People have been interacting with software developers directly for years. We used to use BBSes, Usenet, mailing lists or sometimes direct emails. Maybe vie finally hit some "old fogey" point but I refuse to be awed by communicating via 140 character messages. The only reason we kept BBS postings short is we were charged by the minute and had slow modems.

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:Gained respect for NYT

[guyminuslife]

the US wouldn't (heck, already doesn't) recognise British "English" as official and vice-versa.

FTFY

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[guyminuslife]

Yes, all languages borrow from other languages. IANAL[inguist], but as far as I know most languages don't do it to the degree that English, historically, has. Old English is/was a Germanic language, but subsequent French (and early Latin) influence has had so much impact on the language that it's almost an honorary Romance language.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[jonaskoelker]

HAI! I CAN HAZ TWEETER??

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[guyminuslife]

Case in point: the only French phrase I know how to say is "parle vous anglais?" and I don't know how to spell it. I can take Beowulf (written in English about 1000 years ago) and Les Miserables (written in French about 150 years ago), and put them side to side...I can't actually read either of them, but I can get a bit more out of the French.

I had a roommate from Iran, and I was dumbfounded when he told me that they can actually read their own medieval literature.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[pjt33]

There is a major difference between natural languages and programming languages with respect to authority: with programming languages, people tend to aim to follow the spec. Maybe the Germans follow the recommendations of their academy, but the French certainly don't - the Academie Française tends to come up with convoluted expressions for neologisms and the man on the street sticks with the snappy loanword.

On your point about English having multiple centres, the two official languages where I live both have multiple academies. Spanish has 22 Academias, which collaborate for works such as the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas but also produce their own works: for example, the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua produces a Diccionario breve de Mexicanismos . Catalan / Valenciano has one academy in Barcelona and another in Valencia.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hognoxious]

I don't know why you think there's an influence from early Latin. It was 43AD before the Romans got there. Most of the Latin influence is scientific terms invented from the renaissance[1] onwards.

As to being a romance language, that's laughable. The vast majority of the most commonly used words - family members, farm animals, body parts - are Germanic. Then there's the presence of a neuter gender which Italian, French and Spanish all lack, and the placement of adjectives.

[1] I'll give you that one.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hognoxious]

In some dialects of English "island" is pronounced the same as "Ireland".

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hognoxious]

Englishes origins was as a Germanic language.

I can see your an experts.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hognoxious]

Surprised the article didn't include "Loughborough"[1], which has it twice but pronounced two different ways.

[1] It's a town between Leicester and Nottingham. It has a university where people who are good at sport but not clever enough for Oxford or Cambridge go.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hognoxious]

They aren't mutually exclusive, given the context.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[mapkinase]

Sorry for highjacking your top rated comment, friend, but would like to use this historic opportunity to nominate this submission for the stuff that mattered the most this year: a stupid newspaper rant about a stupid social media service.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[digitig]

I don't think you understand what "standard English" is.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[cgomezr]

"The vast* majority* of the most commonly* used* words - family* members*, farm animals*, body parts* - are Germanic*."

The starred words there come from Latin (there may be more, I only marked those I am sure about).

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[guyminuslife]

I meant "early" relative to English history, not Roman history. You should parse that as "Old English in 1000 AD was a Germanic language that had some small Latin influence from Roman occupation and would later get a lot of French influence from the Norman conquest."

Also, I'm not saying that English is actually a Romance language---you don't need more than a semester of high school Spanish to debunk that notion. If it really were a Romance language, then there wouldn't really be anything to remark on; the interesting thing is that it's a Germanic language that has absorbed so much Latin vocabulary that it seems like sort of the German cousin of the true Romantic languages. I don't know if that's common in language development or not.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[BoberFett]

If twitter.com was to be trusted with defining our language, the correct spelling would now be "u" so I think I'll stick with the NYT editor for now. I'd rather not allow my language to be defined by the detritus of society.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[BoberFett]

The Japanese invented an entirely new alphabet just for foreign words. There must be enough words that they've co-opted to make that exercise worthwhile.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[BoberFett]

Tweet also applies only to one specific function of a specific commercial website. At least the word blog is a generic term that anybody can use.

I can just see the uproar on /. if the following headline hit the mainstream:

"Canonical Ltd released the newest version of their windows today."

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Antisyzygy]

That is not a valid argument against what I said.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[jez9999]

That's very cromulent of him.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[jez9999]

I had a roommate from Iran, and I was dumbfounded when he told me that they can actually read their own medieval literature.

As far as I'm aware, the Quran hasn't changed much in 2000 years...

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[TomXP411]

I'm just trying to figure out where the two words "web site" got concatenated in to one word. To me, it's as bad as "alot".

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[jnork]

Heh. I remember translating a phone conversation for my colleague (a French expatriate) who was calling a contractor (a German expatriate). Their only common language was English.

Neither could understand a word of each other's speech. :)

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[majid_aldo]

how is this functionally different from following a web journal (blog)?!

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Grishnakh]

Give it 20 years. If people are still talking about "tweeting", then you might have a point. I suspect Twitter will be long-forgotten by that time though.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[guyminuslife]

Arabic != Farsi

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Moridineas]

What's the old quote? "England and America are two countries separated by a common tongue." What does that mean for French and Germans speaking English? :p

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Moridineas]

I can't tell if you're trying to troll or not (I'm guessing yes due to AC?) but in any case...

Unless you're talking Esperanto, no language was designed, correct.

However, you would have to be incredibly foolish to underestimate the normative powers of the institutions and high culture! Many countries/languages--France, Spain, Turkey, etc--have government institutions that decide what words are official, and what spellings are official. This gets passed on through schools, dictionaries etc. Sometimes their success is great, other times not so much. America doesn't have anything quite like that, but "CNN english" absolutely has a normative impact, as do the Chicago Manual of Style and Strunk and White.

Someone deciding how a language ought to be spoken, written, etc is as old as language.

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[Hstroll]

I can read medieval or even earlier literature as well. It is called classical Chinese language..

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[jahudabudy]

I clicked and saw this:

"Why do so many people ask me about the nickname? Let me make this perfectly clear: .oO DYKE! Oo."

I assume that is what she is referring to, but I'm still unclear. She is in training to be a dyke? I wasn't aware that really required specialized skills...

Re:Gained respect for NYT

[YourExperiment]

Would anybody have used those words, even back then?

He has a point

[peacefinder]

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?]

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!

Re:He has a point

[onionman]

I agree! I've always felt like the NYT held a good balance between proper (American) English and pedantic grammar rules. Maybe other will follow. It would be nice if more media sources (both print and on-line) would follow the example set by The NYT, The New Yorker, and The Economist.

Re:He has a point

[wisnoskij]

Tweet is a word, same as all the rest. and while it is more then possible that it will fade from style that does not mean that it should not be used.

if you are looking back at really old news articles you most likely want to know what it was like back then and the lingo is part of that.

Sure it makes it harder to understand, but no one reads 40 yo new papers to get cold hard facts.

Re:He has a point

[carlzum]

I have no argument if it's used in a quote or a reference to the term "tweet." But the NY Times wants its writers to avoid using slang in their own copy. It would be like going back to the 1960s archive and reading an article describing Kennedy's speech as "groovy." Even worse, "tweet" reinforces a fallacy that Twitter offers some novel, unique form of communicating.

Re:He has a point

[geekoid]

He is only going to use language that never looses meaning through time? yeah, good luck with that.

It's also a disingenuous way to represent the current culture climate.

Re:He has a point

[Mr. Freeman]

"Tweet is a word"
Tweet is what a bird does. Tweet does not, officially, mean "to submit a text string to twitter.com". The problem using "tweet" is that it's slang. Slang terms are unprofessional. You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11" instead of "police shoot a woman after she attempted to rob a convenience store".

This entire situation is not a matter of "do people understand what we're saying?" It's a matter of "Is this professional". Of course people know what the word "tweet" means, but the issue is that it's not professional.

And responding to the assertion that twitter will force out the NYT: bullshit. Refusing to use slang terms in a professional publication does not ensure said publication's demise. In fact, it ensures exactly the opposite, that people will still regard the NYT as a professional publication with real writers, not some website where anyone can post literally anything without even the most basic fact checking.

Re:He has a point

[Hognoxious]

Tweet is a word, same as all the rest. and while it is more then possible that it will fade from style that does not mean that it should not be used.

It doesn't mean you have to use it every other sentence. This is particularly true if the subject of the story is Egyptian mummies, the campaigns of Napoleon, or a new composition by Philip Glass. Actually, on second thoughts it's probably OK for the latter.

Re:He has a point

[JanneM]

"It's also a disingenuous way to represent the current culture climate."

Last time I looked, newspapers were into reporting news. "Represent the current culture climate" is what literature majors are supposed to be doing between shifts at the fryer station.

Re:He has a point

[icebraining]

Won't we have wikipedia like systems in the future? I can find out what "flapper" means in four clicks or eight key presses.

Re:He has a point

[nebaz]

Even Mark Twain made this mistake once: 'The "advice" is concerning deportment on reaching the Gate which St. Peter is supposed to guard: Upon arrival do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. ... Don't try to kodak him. Hell is full of people who have made that mistake.' (Emphasis mine). Kodak was used as a verb often back then, as they basically had a camera monopoly. Nowadays, we can understand the reference, but it still seems weird.

Re:He has a point

[Lars512]

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?]

In 100 years, the archive will interactively back up the word tweet with a wealth of information about Twitter and the culture of the times, for those interested. For those not, it will simply paraphrase tweet with something comprehensible to the person reading it, so that they can understand and move on.

I don't think thoughts of future archiving should deter us from using language however we see fit.

Re:He has a point

[dotgain]

The inability to edit / delete comments after posting is one of the few good things left about Slashdot, in my opinion.

Otherwise, people have the tendency to retroactively "not say something", and make one of their responders look like an over-reacting fool. Sure, I've fallen prey to exactly the same problem you've had there and had to suck up the shame and reply to myself on occasion, but I think this is far out-weighed by the need for commitment to one's expressions.

Re:He has a point

[yurtinus]

Imagine all the people.... living live in peeeeaace....

Re:He has a point

[wisnoskij]

I would disagree with you that a word has to be in a famous dictionary to be officially a word.
and either way after google the verb becoming a "official" word it is only a matter of time(probably a very short time) till tweet is in the dictionary.

And I would also say it is not the same as street slang.
IMHO street slang is purposely made to be unprofessional and insulting.
Tweet is not this and is as professional (IMHO) as any other word.

I can understand that older people might find it unprofessional but I am assure you that many people find the word and words like it perfectly fine.

Re:He has a point

[Brett Buck]

.

Slang terms are unprofessional. You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11"

Finally a Slashdot post I can understand!

Re:He has a point

[PCM2]

Slang terms are unprofessional. You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11" instead of "police shoot a woman after she attempted to rob a convenience store".

I think the problem there has less to do with professionalism than with the fact that the slang version is simply hard to understand. News writers favor plain, direct, comprehensible English. There is no benefit gained by obscuring your story with pointless colloquialisms.

Re:He has a point

[thenextstevejobs]

" You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11"

Are you listening NYT? I will buy print and web editions of your paper, as well as follow you on Twitter if this starts happening.

Re:He has a point

[ciaohound]

Phil Corbett, is that you?

Re:He has a point

[icebraining]

If they write "a Twitter update", I will want to know what Twitter is/was. Unless they replace it with a forty word description of the system, I don't see the advantage.

And in a movie, yes, I want to see "tweeted", unless it's a documentary. Despite what rules the media might set, people in general say "googled" or "tweeted" and making the characters say other things will sound forced.

Re:He has a point

[Grishnakh]

I disagree. It's annoying when you make a mistake. There should be a time window where you can edit your post, perhaps 1 minute. That'd be plenty of time to notice the dumb spelling/grammar error in your post, but not nearly enough time for someone else to post a reply, you to read that reply, and then decide to alter your post to make him look like a fool.

Re:He has a point

[oatworm]

Is that before or after they deconstruct the current cultural aporia?

Re:He has a point

[ToasterMonkey]

Otherwise, people have the tendency to retroactively "not say something", and make one of their responders look like an over-reacting fool.

Don't Slashdot's default threading and moderation settings do this already?

I have to quote everything I reply to because you never know what context readers or meta mods will take this in.

Go browse /. with default settings sometime, it's scary and disconnected :\

Re:He has a point

[dotgain]

If you insist on clicking a button before proofreading your post, then make it the 'Preview' button. It behaves exactly as you seem to desire, with the option of completely abandoning your post at that stage if you wish.

I said that I realise it's annoying when you make a mistake, but that I believe this is outweighed by the need for commitment. If you want to debate with me, debate the point I make, or not at all.

Re:He has a point

[TheABomb]

Tweet does not, officially, mean "to submit a text string to twitter.com".

Oh, really? According to The Twitter Glossary,

Tweet (verb)
Tweet, Tweeting, Tweeted. The act of posting a message, often called a "Tweet", on Twitter. Find out how to post a Tweet.

Tweet (noun)
A message posted via Twitter containing 140 characters or fewer. Find out how to post a Tweet.

If anyone has a right to define terms relating to Twitter, that'd be it.

Re:He has a point

[Nidi62]

You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11" instead of "police shoot a woman after she attempted to rob a convenience store".

They'd probably find their readership grow substantially if all their articles were written like that. I know I'd subscribe.

Re:He has a point

[Belial6]

Well, given that complaining about a person's grammar or spelling is pretty much always a way of saying 'I agree with everything you have said, but don't want to admit it.', your post leads me to believe that you completely agree with your previous post.

Re:He has a point

[Belial6]

You have a lot more faith in the future of copyright than I do.

Re:He has a point

[the phantom]

I agree with you that dictionaries are not the arbiters of language, and that a word need not be in a dictionary in order to be considered a useful part of the language. Dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive. That being said, the decision of the New York Times to disallow the use of "tweet" in news stories it perfectly understandable. In terms of language use, newspapers should be professional. Newspapers are presenting a record of what is happening, as it is happening. This record is intended not just for the current generation, but for future generations, as well. This is especially true of large newspapers with an international readership and influence, such as the New York Times.

So, while "many people find the word [tweet] and words like it perfectly fine," it is likely that (as others have pointed out) the word will eventually fade from the language. It is a fad word tied to a particular brand, and probably will not last. If, in another 10 or 15 years Twitter is still around, and people are still using the word, it might be time for the New York Times to reevaluate its policy. However, right now, it does not appear that the word has any staying power, thus it would be unprofessional for the New York Times to use it.

Re:He has a point

[Cimexus]

As an aside, that 'using a brand name as a word' thing seems to be predominantly American thing. I hadn't actually heard of Kleenex being used as a verb (or even a noun frankly) before I visited the US. We (Australia, NZ and as far as I can tell, the UK) just say tissue. Even though Kleenex is a dominant brand of tissues here just as in the US (although certainly not the only brand).

Ditto with Xerox and Hoover and no doubt some others I haven't heard of. Although 'to google' as a verb does seem to have caught on. I guess the world is smaller and language more easily 'spread' now than in the days when the 'Kleenex' usage arose in the US.

Re:He has a point

[91degrees]

It's his job to be uptight about this sort of thing. House style is important. Even the readers of today can't all be expected to really understand what twitter is.

Re:He has a point

[jonaskoelker]

but the issue is that it's not professional

Exactly what does that mean? That it shouldn't be done as part of your job? But what if your job is tweeting information about your company's products? Or writing documentation for software using the Twitter API?

Okay, so you were talking about journalists---but in that case, you're saying that "Journalists shouldn't say 'tweet' because it's [a thing you shouldn't do if you're working as a journalist]" (i.e. [...]=unprofessional).

But that looks like a circular argument.

I think a less circular argument might go something like this: not using the word "tweet" to mean "post on twitter.com" will make the NYT sell better, because its target audience (1) dislikes that meaning of the word; and/or (2) wants (relatively) slang-free language.

(Which is of course what you're really saying, so I'm in violent agreement with you; but I think the form of the argument is relevant.)

Re:He has a point

[Mr. Freeman]

"Professionalism" is not a good thing always in journalism if you are trying to make money"

The job of the media is not to make money, it's to print the facts in a professional and unbiased manner.

Re:He has a point

[mjwalshe]

no Hacks love a punning head line - though what would you make of the "GOTHCHA" headline the sun used once (the sinking of the belgrano)

Re:He has a point

[Wildfire Darkstar]

"Kleenex" I'll grant you, but I've never heard "Hoover" used as a verb in an American context. It's always just been "vacuum." The only people I've ever heard use it as such have been British.

Although, come to think of it, I haven't actually seen a Hoover-brand vacuum cleaner in ages. But I've yet to hear anyone talk about "Kenmoring" or "Dysoning" their carpet, either.

Re:He has a point

[Hognoxious]

Just lock it once someone posts a reply (or opens the window to do so).

Re:He has a point

[Hognoxious]

Well, given that complaining about a person's grammar or spelling is pretty much always a way of saying 'I agree with everything you have said, but don't want to admit it.'

[citation needed]

Re:He has a point

[jez9999]

He is only going to use language that never looses meaning through time? yeah, good luck with that.

He should only use language that has a meaning now. If it has to loose it over time, how are people meant to understand its meaning now?

Re:He has a point

[teneighty]

What you're looking for is The New York Post...

Re:He has a point

[Belial6]

Sure. Here you go.

Re:He has a point

[caitsith01]

You might as well allow NYT editors to write articles like "Popo caps a bitch after she tried to jack a 7-11" instead of "police shoot a woman after she attempted to rob a convenience store".

Thanks to The Wire the rest of the world could finally begin to understand US media reports if articles did in fact take this form.

Re:He has a point

[PCM2]

You're calling the Sun a newspaper?

Re:He has a point

[mjwalshe]

well not a proper one :-)

Agreed

[Concern]

Sounds like good editorial policy to me.

"Tweet" is almost as bad as "blogosphere."

Re:Agreed

[Kjella]

I know some people are opposed to every new word, but personally I think tweet is one of the better. It was obviously established as a word long before Twitter, at least as far back as 1942. The analogy between a short chirp and a short message works very well with very low probability of confusion, particularly since birds tend to do it all the time for no apparent reason and Twitter users... well, you get the idea. It works in Norwegian too, we have translated to tweet (birds) which is to "kvitre" and people use either that or "tvitre" to be more similar to English. I'm fairly sure this one is here to stay just as "to chat" or "to text", even if something else than Twitter becomes the way to do it.

Re:Agreed

[Concern]

If the word gains traction over time (instead of joining the graveyard of Internet Fad Words), it will gradually begin sounding more mature and ordinary. Then writers and editors will change their attitude towards it.

But right now, the problem is not its construction or metaphorical appropriateness, but its newness, its faddishness, and most of all, the "feel" of it in English, which I can best describe as "twee."

Re:Agreed

[sortius_nod]

It's amusing that geeks hate these terms, but the unwashed masses love them. The seem to think it makes themselves sound "edgy" or "with it", meanwhile, anyone who knows more than how to use the odd website and check email don't use them.

I've never said "blogosphere" except to take the piss out of someone/something, and "tweet", well, I just tell people they have "twat" or are "twatting".

Re:Agreed

[Grishnakh]

I completely disagree. "Tweet" is something that birds do, and is a perfectly fine term for that. However, we don't need to repurpose common words for new internet fads, and then use these in professional writing. It's just confusing to anyone who isn't knowledgeable about all the latest stupid fads, and worse, if someone reads an article from today 25 years from now, long after this fad has probably faded away just like many things during the dot-com era, they'll probably have no clue what the author is talking about if he uses the word "tweet".

Re:Agreed

[Runaway1956]

Even if you're right - tweeting will always be gay.

Re:Agreed

[Bing Tsher E]

I just try to work the word 'twit' into the conversation in place of 'tweet' whenever possible. You need to do so as if you didn't notice any difference.

Re:Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Chance has, I am archeologist of future. Traveled now for investigate your strange word usage {tweet | kleenex | slashdotted}. Also your convoluted sentences for {articles | compounds}.

Thanks arguing for obviate my job, insensitive clod!

Re:Agreed

[FatdogHaiku]

I have to agree that the term had validity before the service existed. The resistance to change in language is pretty common to all cultures, but intolerance in the case of English is hilarious given the massive polyglot that is it's roots. Usage has always driven the evolution of English and when it stops growing it will start dieing.

A tweet is a local thing to a bird, and that concept parallels the service too. People that choose to be local to you "hear your tweets". It's not in and of itself a bad thing and it can and will be used for good in some cases. Just as with birds, a tweet can signal danger or summon aid... we really need to let it die down like MySpace did and like Facebook will. It will find it's nitch and when it does we may actually find it a useful tool in our AADD riddled lives.

All that said. I personally do not use the service. I suspect that I might feel a bit jealous because I know no one will ever report that:
"TheLinus" agrees with the 'slash' posted by "FatdogHaiku"...

Re:Agreed

[LordLimecat]

People who dont use twitter, you mean. What else would you call "the act of posting to twitter"?

Re:Agreed

[lostmongoose]

People who dont use twitter, you mean. What else would you call "the act of posting to twitter"?

'being a twat' works.

Re:Agreed

[Delusion_]

No different than "cyber" or (and it took longer for this to go away), "surf". And good riddance to both. I don't hate twitter, but I think it's a pointless waste of time. I do hate "tweet". It's precious and annoying.

Re:Agreed

[JackieBrown]

People who dont use twitter, you mean. What else would you call "the act of posting to twitter"?

I would call it "posting" just like I do when I post on a forum or facebook.

Re:Agreed

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I just try to work the word 'twit' into the conversation in place of 'tweet' whenever possible. You need to do so as if you didn't notice any difference.

Is that because it's actually silly or because being annoyed with it makes you look like you're ahead of the internet curve?

I don't mean to sound insulting, I just think geeks in particular like to grumble about things that are loved by the masses in order to seem above average. I'm not too proud to admit that I do that.

Re:Agreed

[Antisyzygy]

I still sort of cringe at "blog".

Re:Agreed

[LoverOfJoy]

I'm not opposed to every new word but I do think that newspapers ought to be at least a bit slower to pick up newer lingo that borders on slang. When they MUST use some new tech slang, keep it with a brief explanation.

Re:Agreed

[LoverOfJoy]

I would call it "posting" just like I do when I post on a forum or facebook.

Wait, you don't call posting on a forum, frumming? You don't call posting on facebook, sharing? Get with the times, man!

Re:Agreed

[vlueboy]

People who dont use twitter, you mean. What else would you call "the act of posting to twitter"?

The same as "the act of posting to slashdot" ;)
Posts are posts here and on twitter, even if there they count more as updates to some mythical first post we're all born from.

Re:Agreed

[Hognoxious]

Cyber (as a prefix, such as in cybernetics) has been around since before computers were mainstream.

Re:Agreed

[mjwalshe]

I agree - the DT sometimes has an pullout from the NYT in it and it looks like a paper from the 50's (using "roiled" in a headline!!) Phil Corbett is probaly pining for the days of hot metal and when the leader articles where chisled into granite slabs rather than thease new fangled typewriters!

Re:Agreed

[vook]

Next hurdle?
Convince people to cease using wikipedia as a reference.

Re:Agreed

[vegiVamp]

So true ! A man can't even be happy anymore without perverts trying to come on to him. Why did we allow the damn homosexuals to steal our gayness ? *cough*

Re:Agreed

[vegiVamp]

I'm guessing we grumble because we don't understand why the masses seem so in love with things of which we realise that they're really not that big a deal.

Re:Agreed

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I'm guessing we grumble because we don't understand why the masses seem so in love with things of which we realise that they're really not that big a deal.

Hah. Yeah we know all about what's important like who the best Starship Captain is, which game console is truly superior, and why movies from 30 year old TV shows make us want to hang ourselves. We even think knowing the difference between a hub and a switch makes us 'smart' and everybody else 'dumb'. Yes, we truly are masters of knowing what isn't a big deal.

Re:Agreed

[bipbop]

Reading the word "blogosphere" doesn't bother me, but I don't think I could say it with a straight face. In fact, I felt compelled to put scare quotes around it in this post. "Tweet", on the other hand, is annoying to me, but maybe that's because I find Twitter annoying ;-)

Re:Agreed

[AthanasiusKircher]

I know some people are opposed to every new word, but personally I think tweet is one of the better. It was obviously established as a word long before Twitter, at least as far back as 1942.

What?! You've never heard of the word "twitter" before... referring to birds flying around, etc.? It's a fairly common English word. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest usage from Chaucer in 1374:

The Iangelynge bryd..enclosed in a streyht cage..twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.

On the other hand, "tweet" was first used in 1845. "Twitter" is almost 500 years older.

It works in Norwegian too, we have translated to tweet (birds) which is to "kvitre" and people use either that or "tvitre" to be more similar to English. I'm fairly sure this one is here to stay just as "to chat" or "to text"

By the way, "twitter" has meant "chattering" among people for almost 200 years. Futhermore, "kvitre" is etymologically related to "twitter," not "tweet"! Can't you hear the similarity to "twitter"?

Sheesh... +5 insightful for that....

News flash

[geekoid]

IF a new service sprung up tomorrow, everyone would STILL call them tweets.

That will forever be the term.

Typical old media school thinking

Re:News flash

[dloose]

Yeah, man... things are never gonna change. EVER. Thinking otherwise is so old-school ~

Re:News flash

[ZeBam.com]

Not according to trademark and copyright law.

Re:News flash

[bonch]

No, it will not forever be the term. "Tweet" is a very Twitter-specific term, and a stupid one at that.

Re:News flash

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it will not forever be the term. "Tweet" is a very Twitter-specific term, and a stupid one at that.

Unlike the term used for the people who use Twitter: "Twats".

Re:News flash

[digitalhermit]

In my humble opinion, "twit" seems a perfectly cromulent word for senders of Twitter messages.

Re:News flash

[Kitkoan]

No, it will not forever be the term. "Tweet" is a very Twitter-specific term, and a stupid one at that.

So is a Kleenex, a Band-Aid, a coke and yet those words are still commonly used without meaning the brand they represent.

Re:News flash

[Hognoxious]

How many expression are in everyday use even thought there original meaning is archaic?

Please tell me you did that - all of it - on purpose.

Re:News flash

[tepples]

Unlike the term used for the people who use Twitter: "Twats".

As opposed to the people that Twitter uses, which are called sockpuppets.

Re:News flash

[cashman73]

No, it will not forever be the term. "Tweet" is a very Twitter-specific term, and a stupid one at that.

Of course, by the same argument, the NYT should ban the term "slashdot" or "slashdotted", when referring to sites that get overloaded by their traffic,. . .

Re:News flash

[geekoid]

Put a sock in it.

Oh wait, no one would say that because they don't use gramophones anymore.

Some phrase stick around long after their reason for coming into common parlance as become archaic.

Re:News flash

[dangitman]

So is a Kleenex, a Band-Aid, a coke and yet those words are still commonly used without meaning the brand they represent.

Not for much longer. Even today, not many people use these brands in favor of their more generic alternatives.

Does anybody actually say "Kleenex" instead of "tissue" anymore? When people say "Coke" they usually mean Coca-Cola, not anything else. I think Band-Aid is still the most common, that's in regular use. But give it a decade or so, and it will no longer be.

Re:News flash

[RNelson]

Does anybody actually say "Kleenex" instead of "tissue" anymore?

Yes. While I don't think I ever buy Kleenex brand, it throws me when someone asks for "tissue." I, and it appears quite a few people I know, grew up using "Kleenex" as the generic term.

Re:News flash

[Ramze]

Perhaps in your social circles, but not in mine.

There's only one person I know who even uses the word "tweet." Everyone else I know thinks it's stupid. Most people I know that use twitter still say "sent a twitter alert", "sent a twitter update", "posted to twitter", or "follow me on twitter" because "sent a tweet" and "follow my tweets" both sound about as stupid as Steve Ballmer sounded when he talked about "sending a squirt" or "squirting" data between devices.

No one can say for sure, but my money is on "tweet" becoming as archaic as it is juvenile & it will be largely forgotten.

Re:News flash

[tepples]

Put a sock in it.

Twitter has already put a dozen socks in it.

Re:News flash

[moore.dustin]

That will forever be the term.

This move alone almost surely ensures that 'tweet' as a reference to Twitter will _not_ live forever. Major publications, especially the NYT, control the progression of grammar and punctuation in the English language... almost exclusively. Their influence is undeniable with a great deal of modern grammar rules being able to be traced back to a single publication and/or editor's decision. Even while major newspaper circulation is down in the 21st century, these publications are still the gatekeepers to the rules regarding grammar and punctuation.

In terms of vocabulary, they will always take a cautious approach. They will choose words, terms or phrases that they think will stand the test of time and not become ambiguous. In this case, the editor feels that 'tweet' will not be synonymous with Twitter in the future and is acting accordingly. He is right.

Re:News flash

[Grishnakh]

1. They aren't used in a professional publication.

2. Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Coke are brands which are still alive and well, and generally dominate their respective markets. No one calls a Coke an "RC", and a lot of younger people probably don't even know what that is. If Twitter fades away, it's most likely the slang term "tweet" will also fade away with it.

Re:News flash

[Grishnakh]

Unlike "tweet", "slashdotted" isn't stupid. But regardless, they shouldn't use that term. It's slang, and has no place in a professional publication.

Re:News flash

[Isaac-Lew]

Why would "slashdotted" be any less stupid than "tweeted"? Both of the terms in their current contexts are derived from specific websites. Comparing the userbases, more people would know what "to tweet" means than "to slashdot".

Re:News flash

[R_Growler]

I agree. Now, lets try to get the plural to of it to be "twats".

Re:News flash

[BoberFett]

Fuv lep da pha kap!

What, didn't understand me? I guess you just need to hurry up and die. I'm changing language faster than you can keep up old man.

Re:News flash

[paimin]

I say "twittered" as measure of who in the room will chime in condescendingly with, "you mean tweeted".

Re:News flash

[windex82]

Except it has nothing to do with that, journalists should strive to not use buzzwords and jargon as the editor pointed out in his memo. It's about proper writing.

He's right

[name_already_taken]

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.

Re:He's right

[SomeJoel]

The word "tweet" might lead future historians to believe people went around making bird noises.

We could only hope that is what they infer. It is so much more elegant than the truth. "omg u r so ded lol"

Re:He's right

[geekoid]

yes, becasue in the future people will be morons.

Most like they will wonder why the NYT banned a common phrase.

Re:He's right

[roju]

The New York Times isn't going anywhere very soon.

Because the newspaper industry is thriving these days and it's inconceivable a paper could close up shop.

I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[mike260]

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.

Re:I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[MrEricSir]

Thankfully, "Get off my lawn" is less than 140 characters.

Re:I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Thank the gods, I thought I was the only one who felt "tweets" and such terms were beyond absurd and annoying. I put such tech-coined terms like "tweet", "blogosphere" (that one is beyond reproach),
"the cloud", etc. on par with hearing all the medical symptoms from these damn medical commercials. "Excessive rectal bleeding may occur. Be sure to talk to your doctor about XYZ".

Fucking absurd.

Re:I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[SIR_Taco]

You should probably blog about that, I bet you'd get a lot of tweets supporting your point of view!

Re:I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[Hognoxious]

Then he could use crowdsourcing to make a literally exponential mashup.

Re:I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[Antisyzygy]

I think namespace is an invented word.

Re:I'm with the palaeolithic dude

[jonaskoelker]

I think someone bricked your dictionary

other services

[belmolis]

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.

Re:other services

[dangitman]

... just as people refer to photocopying as "xeroxing" and to facial tissue as "kleenex".

What is this, the 1980s? I haven't heard anybody refer to photocopying as "xeroxing" in the last 15 years, and I haven't heard anybody call a tissue "kleenex" for around 10 years.

Re:other services

[Dogtanian]

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

That depends what constitutes "replace" and whether what replaces Twitter will be an exact- or close- analogue.

It could be argued that Twitter has displaced and partially "replaced" MSN by some metric- yet no-one uses the verb/noun "MSN" in relation to Twitter even though it was a popular semi-genericised trademark.

Re:other services

[Grishnakh]

Not true, unless Twitter remains in place and dominates its market.

No one uses "xerox" as a verb any more. I haven't heard that since the 80s. Not coincidentally, that's the time when Xerox dominated the photocopying market. They haven't done that for quite some time now, even though they still exist (as a shadow of their former self), and as a result, no use uses that term any more. They either say "copying" or (less often) "photocopying".

Some people still use the term "kleenex", but Kleenex is still probably the largest brand name in tissues after all this time.

Journalists should never use ANY of these terms, however. They're slang. Slang has no place in a professional publication. Or else, as another poster put it, they'd have headlines like "Po-Po Caps Bitch During 7-11 Jacking". If you think that's a proper headline in a newspaper, you're an idiot.

Re:other services

[foniksonik]

I haven't heard anyone use those terms in 20 years. Mostly I hear " make a copy for me" which usually means print an extra copy... I hear "have a tissue?" Which means "do you have a box of fresh clean tissues with lotion on them that I can take and never give back or replace". I also don't hear Rolodex, Scotch Tape, Walkman, or any other brand names for generic goods. When someone says they've got an iPhone it better be an iPhone. Same is true of any other premium brand - otherwise they should just use the generic term.

Twitter or tweeting is very specific. It's not Chat or Texting or Email or Facebook. It uses hashtags for meme labeling and Shortcodes to help compress the communication. It fine if you are ignorant of something that > 100 million people use on a daily basis - just don't try to explain it to anyone else.

Best way not to seem paleolithic?

[MatrixBandit]

..don't use the world "paleolithic".

What's wrong with this?

[bonch]

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.

Re:What's wrong with this?

[SomeJoel]

Yeah, the Onion wrote about FourSquare, not Twitter.

Re:What's wrong with this?

[lee1]

Exactly. Also, the Times may feel that it has a special responsibility, as it is used by lexicographers as a source of usage examples. In others words, it's not merely a case of waiting until a word appears in dictionaries; it's a matter of helping to decide if a word should appear in dictionaries. In regard to "tweet", they've very clearly made the right decision.

The term I've always used...

[WolfTheWerewolf]

for those who "tweet" is "twat".

Much more fitting.

Re:The term I've always used...

[FauxPasIII]

"Twit" works well also.

Re:The term I've always used...

[Grishnakh]

"Twit" works, but "twat" works better due to its other meaning.

Re:The term I've always used...

[Hognoxious]

It's wrong to strike a lady, and I hope she twatted you back.

Go ahead. Laugh.

[ZeBam.com]

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.

Re:Go ahead. Laugh.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't think most people fifty years from now would care to read an article whose topic would cover Twitter and its users. History buffs probably wouldn't mind looking up fad slang words. The article would probably obsolete itself just as quickly whether or not "tweet" is used. Really, I think the question should be who the audience is, how many people will read an article this week, and how many people will read said article this week fifty years from now. I don't think it makes much sense to make a clumsy reference to a Twitter message helps current readers for the sake of a handful of people fifty years from now.

Re:Go ahead. Laugh.

[ZeBam.com]

The problem wouldn't be articles about Twitter, but articles that use the word "tweet" in a way that assumes the reader knows what it is. Think of "telephone call" or "electronic mail message." Self-explanatory terms like those stand the test of time far better.

Re:Go ahead. Laugh.

[Hognoxious]

Even in two years it will probably sound incredibly lame. It's like with children's names, clothes and bands - the more trendy they are right now, the deeper and quicker they fall into the pit of excruciating naffness.

They should probably look at "Googling it," too

[Hottie Parms]

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.

He is right

[bobcat7677]

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.

So what?

[Al Al Cool J]

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.

New usage: Twitter user==Twit

[HornWumpus]

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.

Contradictory

[Rix]

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.

Who is this guy kidding?

[kentrel]

The NYT isn't going anywhere. It may have to evolve to stay afloat, but it'll outlast Twitter for sure. Even if it didn't, it will be better archived for future generations than Twitter will ever be. Digital social media platforms barely last 5 years before their popularity starts to wane. They also have that signal to noise ratio that's a nightmare for any archive or researcher. They also certainly don't have any obligation for fact checking. Fake NYT news stories aside, at least you know a quote is probably a real quote, whether its taken out of context or not is another argument.

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

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[geekoid]

Twitter is an excellent form of communication. Concise and only heard by people interested in the person communicating.

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[kentrel]

Twitter is an excellent form of communication. Concise and only heard by people interested in the person communicating.

Unless you happen to be watching CNN or any other news organisation that seems to think we care what people on twitter think!

Seriously though, you're right in that it does everything its supposed to do, but what people expect from technology changes all the time, and twitter will probably get caught up in the corporate need to oversaturate it with ads or media, or the public's need for something, not necessarily better, but different. That's something all social networks fear the most - not necessarily being bad at what they do, but simply being out of fashion.

People left myspace in droves because it abused its popularit, profile flexibility and became saturated with horrible profiles and mass promotional material and dubious privacy policies. They went to facebook, which is just repeating some of myspace's mistakes and adding a few of their own. Now that I think of it, a lot of people hated facebook as soon as it stopped requiring you to have attended a college and opened up to anyone. It can never be that again, and for that reason, anything else that offers that right balance of exclusivity and popularity will take its place.

It seems that twitter's thing is simplicity, combined with the ability to stay up to date. I can think of a dozen apps that have offered that for years. It only takes twitter making one mistake too many for one of those existing ones or a new one to suddenly become popular, and so on.

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Even if it didn't, it will be better archived for future generations than Twitter will ever be.

How Tweet It Is!: Library [of Congress] Acquires Entire Twitter Archive.

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[PCM2]

The NYT isn't going anywhere. It may have to evolve to stay afloat, but it'll outlast Twitter for sure. Even if it didn't, it will be better archived for future generations than Twitter will ever be.

Are you sure about that?

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[Hurricane78]

ICQ? Are you kidding? ICQ is still dominant around here. And with good reason. We’re neither retarded not spineless enough to become infected with the horrible abomination of a piece of Clippy shit that MSN/WLM is.

And yes, people still love keyboard cat. As there are people coming to the age of being able to not it for the first time every second. Go figure...

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[Tacvek]

Where the hell are you? In the United States, traditional Instant Messaging is virtually extinct. Twitter, Facebook chat, and SMS are used as replacements.

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[cgomezr]

In many parts of Europe, IM is alive and well. Here in Spain, everyone under 30 uses (sadly) WLM. Other countries use ICQ or Yahoo! Messenger (for some reason, each country seems to have their system of choice). Social networks are the medium of choice to connect with 200+ people, but to talk to a closer group of people that they care more about (or want to flirt with) people typically use IM.

And to tell the truth, I don't understand why IM is dying as it is in the US and UK. Twitter and SMS are much slower than IM if you want to have an actual conversation with someone (i.e., one where you can send 10-20 messages in a minute). And facebook chat is just a crippled implementation of IM (horrible interface, need to use a browser, lack of decent features like chat history, etc.).

I have never really been a big fan of IM, I prefer IRC (by the way, get off my lawn) but I don't see why anyone would want to replace IM with Twitter, Facebook or SMS. Maybe I'm missing something. I know people is doing just that on some countries (not most of the world, at the moment) but darned if I know why.

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[Hurricane78]

WTH? People with mod points who believe that dinosaur newnpapers have even a remote chance of surviving? On my Slashdot?? Unpossible! ;)

NYT is already dead. They just don’t know it yet. But you should know better.

Re:Who is this guy kidding?

[Tacvek]

I feel very similarly. IRC works just fine (although the practice of idling for hours is less than ideal). I do agree though that IM would still be preferable to those others if IRC was off the table.

I think part of this is that Facebook is nearly ubiquitous in the US, while in many other locations no one social networking site holds that level of market share. In the US SMS has caught on especially with those in high school (or those who have been in high school in the last year or two) because it can be discretely used while in class. They are then in the habit of using SMS.

Established my ass ...

[unity100]

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.

Tweet isn't a word

[Dr. Hellno]

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.

BBS

[SmallFurryCreature]

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?

Re:BBS

[dangitman]

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.

Never mind 100 years ago, these sentences were posted 10 minutes ago, and I don't have the foggiest idea what they mean.

Re:BBS

[ChunderDownunder]

RSS is alive and well, at least on my phone handset.

It's the most convenient means of accessing content summaries for sites that (a) were designed for desktop resolutions, (b) choke a 3G connection.

Asking a grammar question

[mathfeel]

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?

Re:Asking a grammar question

[mmcxii]

According to several sources on dictionary.com, Google is a verb.

Re:Asking a grammar question

[geekoid]

no.

The revers is also true. Just ebcasue Microsoft chose a common word for their OS, doesn't mean you capatlize it in all cases.

"I looked out of my window to see a bird I had heard tweeting."

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

[M. Baranczak]

US English has a few unofficial standards bodies, and the NY Times is one of them.

Re:A weak chirping sound

[TheABomb]

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles. Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Interesting history exercise: find out what year NYT stopped using the standard English "piloting of motored coaches", with its etymological pedigree in the noble seafaring arts, in lieu of the much more vulgar "driving a car", or went to "e-mail" from the proper "dispersal of magic telegrams by way of the electronic devil-machine." The last fifty times I've heard the word "tweet" used were all in non-ornithological contexts.

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

[treeves]

Perhaps if you google it, you can find a counterexample.

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.

Linguistic Progress in Retweet....

[aapold]

I'll bet people are tweeting this story even now....

Tarzan say....

[GeoSanDiego]

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).

And yet...

[magsol]

"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'm not sure about your examples...

[N0Man74]

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.

Just sayin....

[GeoSanDiego]

These newfangled internetty verbs will never last. Just google it if you don't believe me.

Stupid Words and "Paleolithic" Media.

[FunWithKnives]

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.

Re:Stupid Words and "Paleolithic" Media.

[timeOday]

Yup, wake me up when somebody "tweets" the contemporary equivalent of The Pentagon Papers, and fights the court battles up to the Supreme Court to do so.

Reducto ad absurdum

[techno-vampire]

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!"

Pretentious bastards

[JRHelgeson]

' After all, he points out, ' ... another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion.'

...and we must not use the word DIAL when referring to calling someone, because a push-button touch tone phone may come along and replace the phone dial, and the term "dialing a number" may fade into oblivion.

How about google...

[keirre23hu]

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.

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:How about google...

[Matthew M. McClinch]

I love how after the definition it says "Learn more about 'google' with Bing - bing.com"

Re:How about google...

[adolf]

Go ahead, try it. "Binging" for "Google" produces a far more useful result than I would've expected.

Re:How about google...

[xero314]

The verb google has already been added the new Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Merriam-Webster also says that a correct pronunciation of the word Nuclear is "nyü-, ÷-ky-lr". Go to the site and you can even listen to it being mispronounced. Just saying that I wouldn't take Merriam-Webster to be a reliable source on the english language.

Re:Get with it man

[Midnight Thunder]

The NYT Editor needs to get into the 21st century. A post to Twitter is a "Tweet".

So what is a post to Slashdot? A "slash" as in "I just read a slash on Slashdot" or "I am just slashing to Slashdot"? While I fully appreciate evolving a language, keeping a certain universality helps to communicate better.

That question everyone isn't asking...

[LostCluster]

Can you xerox something you tivo'ed or would you have a mess that you'd have to kleenex up?

Will Twitter be here in 50 years? Wrong question

[Nova Express]

The question is: Will the New York Times be here in 50 years?

My guess is no. It may not even last ten.

Lawrence Person
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
http://www.battleswarmblog.com/

Grow up

[fcastro7]

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.

Re:Will Twitter be here in 50 years? Wrong questio

[slimjim8094]

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.

He is right.

[Golden_Rider]

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").

Re:Get with it man

[Toonol]

It's also a "post to Twitter," with equal validity. That also is a more professional and timeless way to refer to a "tweet". There is a difference between casual and formal writing.

The NYT also doesn't use "googled" as a verb, nor should they. They don't use "torrented", and they don't even use "chick", preferring to use the term "woman". They don't use the same casual slang and jargon that you or I use in common everyday speech, and they're right in avoiding that.

Jargon

[Edis Krad]

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!

Re:Jargon; Remember your audience

[jklovanc]

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.

I hate the new gray and green twitter

[Requiem18th]

And how do I tweet in this thing?

My bet is on BOTH. :)

[Hurricane78]

"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. ;)

BLLLOOOOOOOOOOGGGGGGGGZZZ

[lanner]

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.

Really,

[Thoggins]

This isn't that big a deal.

Re:Will Twitter be here in 50 years? Wrong questio

[DriedClexler]

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...

The only good thing about Twitter is...

[billcopc]

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays

Everyone else can eat a bag of dicks. Twitter is, to me, a one-liner joke delivery mechanism.

Thank God the Recession's Over!

[TheABomb]

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.

Times Change

[DavidD_CA]

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.

Saw off his tweeter

[linebackn]

I hereby sentence you to death by... uh hu uh huhu.. death by.. uh hu uh.. saw off his tweeter! [sound of chainsaw revving]

that's thweet!

[maggotbrain_777]

This thread needed a LISP joke.

Except it's not IRC.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Except it's not IRC.

[soppsa]

Except nothing on Twitter is very private in the end.... so its more like there is no Twitter analogue for most IRC usage.

Good choice

[Matrix14]

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!

I agree, actually

[grasshoppa]

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.

The Internet HAS no words of its own.

[SanityInAnarchy]

"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.

Re:The Internet HAS no words of its own.

[Hognoxious]

Post also means to apply an entry to an account. It's not much of a stretch to apply it to making an entry on a blogosite.

Re:The Internet HAS no words of its own.

[skrugen]

Post as a verb has been used since at least 1630 to mean 1 a : to publish, announce, or advertise by or as if by use of a placard b : to denounce by public notice c : to enter on a public listing

The word Internet is derived from the prefix inter- (carried on between) and network. Internet.

Both of your examples have their roots in standard English. Stop being obtuse. This is about using, for example, tissue over Kleenex or cotton swab over Q-tip.

Bruce Schneier is right again

[hyperion2010]

Just call them "Twit alerts"

Squirt

[goombah99]

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.

If the editor doesn't want to sound paleolithic...

[JustinFreid]

...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.

We're getting older....

[ezratrumpet]

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."

Tweet is a proper word

[mysidia]

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

[SpaghettiPattern]

Tweetle tweetle dumb.

Mod parent up!

[Brett Buck]

And grandparent, too! You win this thread!

Re:NYC

[Golias]

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.

And if you do, don't Xerox the prints

[jonaskoelker]

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!

Re:And if you do, don't Xerox the prints

[jez9999]

Or hoover the clouds!

Understanding is the point

[emakinen]

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?

Wow...

[The Good Reverend]

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.

Re:Wow...

[David Jao]

Is Twitter new and very possibly a passing fad? Sure. Maybe it'll stick around, maybe it won't.

It makes every bit of sense for the New York Times to wait a few years and find out whether or not the term will stick around before they start committing to using the word in their articles. After all, once a New York Times article is written, it is archived for a very long time, and there is no way to go back into the archives and revise the articles to replace one word with another. A conservative approach is the only thing that makes sense.

If the word tweet were absolutely irreplaceable to the point where no other reasonable phrasing could convey the same meaning, then there might be a case for the New York Times to use the word prematurely. But that is certainly not the case here.

The "get off my lawn" patrol is a natural reaction to the absurdly biased comments from the submitter. The New York Times was founded in 1851. Twitter is not even five years old. The New York Times has survived wars, depressions, and technological and economic revolutions that absolutely dwarf anything we see today. It is far more likely that the New York Times will outlast Twitter than the other way around.

what a bunch of idiots

[mestar]

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.

The people who "hate" twitter

[brunes69]

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.
 

Re:The people who "hate" twitter

[BoberFett]

Web 2.0 was in many ways broken when it first came out. So much was done in Flash, and many AJAX sites often had no way to link to anything of any value because URLs never changed as data changed. There are valid reasons not to jump on every technology as soon as it's released.

Re:The people who "hate" twitter

[brunes69]

You are totally missing my point.

Technology is a tool, not an end to itself.

Saying twitter is "useless / pointless / I hate it" because you don't know how to manage your follow list is like saying a hammer is useless because when I use it I hit my thumb.

It's not the tool, it's the methodology. Same with "Web 2.0", as per your above example.

Re:The people who "hate" twitter

[petermgreen]

I'm a beliver that AJAX and the like have thier place but are often misused.

In particular i'm against anything that works against "deep linking" of material on the web whether that be framesets where if you link to an individual page the site becomes unnavigable. AJAX that pulls all content into the same page, deliberate anti deep linking measures or whatever. Linking whether manually or by search engines is the whole point of the web! /. for all it's web design faults is actually a good example of how you can use AJAX to make a more friendly discussion system while preserving the ability to link to individual posts.

Re:The people who "hate" twitter

[ClosedSource]

Sure. The early adopters are still laughing about how long it took other people to adopt PointCast.

Re:The people who "hate" twitter

[Ol Olsoc]

Okay, I don't doubt there is some of that.

But there are some of us who don't care for Twitter, because it's a remarkable symptom of terminal self-absorption.

Re:The people who "hate" twitter

[Hadlock]

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.

As near as I can tell there are three groups of people who are actively using twitter:
 
1. People who like being marketed to; find PR interesting to them from their favorite companies etc (baconaise tweets, whitehouse tweets)
2. Journalists who use the twitter service as some sort of public/industry IRC/LinkedIn
3. Teens who perpetually have more time to socialize than the rest of us
 
I have a twitter account since I tend to sign up for services in case I need to use them, I've updated it maybe twice a month. I don't really see the utility of twitter once you graduate from college. Facebook does a much better job (also: pics, no 140char limit etc) and has fantastic smartphone integration. Twitter would have been an excellent service if it had launched in 2003 prior to widespread smartphone adoption.

Just admit it.

[warrax_666]

You're following Stephen Fry, aren't you?

Meep

[ME-iac]

Meh

"Using Twitter"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought "Using Twitter" was a euphemism for defecation. Just ask Gabe.

Yet more proof...

[Lythrdskynrd]

Yet more proof that Slashdot editors know nothing about actual journalism

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.

We Should All Complain

[The Other White Meat]

I was going to send a complaint to the editors, but it looks like their page got Slashdotted.

Corrupting German with English ... horrible

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

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

Don't call me dude

[cavebison]

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.

use of term "gay" banned well into 1990s

[peter303]

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.