Favorite Twitter Feeds

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I have to confess that the first time I heard about Twitter, I was really skeptical.

I mean, I was thinking, how much can you actually say in 140 characters?

But it turns out that sometimes you can say a whole lot.

And lately, I’ve been amused by a Twitter feed.

It’s called Very Short Story.

It’s written by a guy named Sean Hill from Austin, Texas.

And each of his tweets is written in such a way that it evokes this much bigger story that you fill in with your own mind.

For example, how about this one?

I watched my brothers grow up from the woods behind our house, hoping that they would not make the same mistake of beating our father at chess.

Oh, locked in the attic for beating Papa, right?

There’s a whole backstory we’re not getting, and that’s the idea, right?

Something suggested.

Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of dark.

And, well, how about this one?

As a newcomer, I was devastated.

The others tried to comfort me.

It’s okay.

Happens to everyone.

At least you had your clothes on when you died.

I mean, okay, so it’s not William Carlos Williams and his red wheelbarrow.

And they don’t all work either.

But it made me start thinking, who are the poets who are going to adopt this medium?

Do you think this is the new haiku?

I don’t know if it’s the new haiku.

You couldn’t make that.

But I do think that it’s got to prove irresistible to some poets who want to kind of push the bounds of this medium and really try to make art.

I don’t know.

It’s been kind of my little guilty pleasure lately.

Well, you know, I have a new friend on Twitter.

You do?

I do.

I work with the team at copyediting.com as well.

And I was tweeting the other day about compound words.

You know, a compound word is a word that’s made out of, you know, like blackboard is a compound.

High school, yeah.

Right.

So it’s open or closed.

High school, it could be.

If it’s closed, it doesn’t have a space.

If it’s open, it has a space.

And then I got a tweet back from somebody calling themselves Grammar Hulk.

Grammar Hulk.

H-U-L-K, as in the big green guy.

I thought that was you.

No, no, no.

It was not me.

And GrammarHulk, and I’m going to read it in my impression of the Hulk’s voice, GrammarHulk said, Hulk, settle open and close compound question by smashing all words together.

No more spaces.

And no more spaces, of course, has no more spaces.

And the Hulk joke is that Hulk smash.

So Hulk smashing compounds together is pretty funny.

It’s great.

And so you go to GrammarHulk’s Twitter feed and there’s a ton of this stuff.

And it turns out that GrammarHulk is a really nice guy who understands a lot about language

And is just tweeting in a Hulk voice about the ordinary day-to-day issues that you don’t

Like to deal with.

It’s funny stuff.

If you’d like to find out a little bit more about GrammarHulk, GrammarHulk did an interview

With Andy Bechtel, that’s B-E-C-H-T-E-L, on his blog at editorsdesk.wordpress.com.

And we’ll link to that on the website as well.

Well, and of course, you can always follow our Twitter feed.

That’s WayWord.

Twitter.com slash WayWord, right?

Right.

And we’re on Facebook, too, under Wayword Radio.

Or you can drop us a line to the email address, words@waywordradio.org.

And we can take your phone calls all the time.

That’s what voicemail is for.

So call us now or call us later, 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.