The Language of Twitter

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

It’s not every day that you get to see a new body of language appear practically before your eyes, but that’s what’s going on with the Twitter community.

Are you familiar with Twitter, Martha?

Oh, sure, but let’s explain it for everybody else.

Twitter is a kind of microblogging service, I guess is the way to describe it. You post a short message of about 140 characters or less, and then the Twitter service sends it out to anyone who wants to follow what you’re doing. And it can also send it to you by SMS or text message on your phone.

So if I post, I am eating a cheese sandwich, then all of my friends will know Grant is eating a cheese sandwich. It’s pretty simple. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s just really what are you thinking, what are you doing? It’s a way to keep up with people without all the elaborate paraphernalia required for, say, even email or chat because you can do it on your phone. And it’s a way for one person to tell a lot of people what they’re doing.

Imagine you had to send those text messages to all your friends one at a time. It’s efficient.

But what’s really interesting to me, obviously there’s a language angle here, right?

Of course.

Is that with the millions of users that are on the Twitter service, a new jargon is being created. And so you don’t send a message when you use Twitter. You send a tweet, which I like.

I like that, yeah. You tweet other people. And, of course, a Twitter user is a tweeter, T-W-E-E-T-E-R, tweeter. And if you flirt using Twitter, which I must say does happen, although I never respond because I’m married, flirting on Twitter is called twerting, or at least so they say.

But it’s just really interesting to see this language that had to spring up among all the users in order for them to use this service efficiently, right? If it’s all about efficiency, you have to have a language of efficiency as well.

Well, and Grant, what I find interesting about it, too, is that it does demand a certain writerliness. I mean, I look at my Facebook updates from various people, and there are some people who have mastered that 140-character medium much more artfully than other people. You hear their voice in that really small space.

It’s fantastic because one of the problems I have with blogging is that theoretically there’s infinite space on a blog, and people aren’t constrained in any way to be concise or come to the point. And so the difference between being able to post, say, millions or even just thousands of words on a blog and 140 characters on something like text messaging or Twitter, that’s immense.

It requires creativity, efficiency. It requires a conciseness, an understanding of what you’re saying instead of just, like, letting it roll off your keyboard and not bothering to edit. You really – I mean, I find myself spending more time on Twitter sometimes than I ought to because I just want to get it right.

Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s like haiku or maybe high tech-ku.

High tech-ku. Not a bad, not bad, not bad. You can’t waste a word.

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