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

[jhoegl]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[guyminuslife]

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

FTFY

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

The term I've always used...

[WolfTheWerewolf]

for those who "tweet" is "twat".

Much more fitting.

Re:News flash

[dloose]

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

[vegiVamp]

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

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

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

Re:News flash

[digitalhermit]

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

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.

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.