New York Times Bans Use of Word "Tweet" 426
Posted
by
timothy
from the seems-fair-enough dept.
from the seems-fair-enough dept.
An anonymous reader writes "New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett has had enough of his journalists' sloppy writing. Their offense? Using the 'inherently silly' word 'tweet' 18 times in the last month. In an internal memo obtained by theawl.com, he orders his writers to use alternatives, such as '"use Twitter" ... or "a Twitter update."' He admits that ' ... new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words ...' After all, he points out, ' ... another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion.' Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use."
While this sounds like it could as well be an Onion story, the memo is being widely reported.
Re:He has a point (Score:2, Informative)
Imagine imagine imagine me using preview!
Imagine the ability to edit comments! Imagine the ability to post a second one immediately!
A weak chirping sound (Score:5, Informative)
Tweet is not standard English
English has no normative standards body, but a few U.S. dictionaries define "tweet" as "a weak chirping sound".
Re:Gained respect for NYT (Score:5, Informative)
Tweet is not standard English, at least not yet.
According to the Complete Oxford English Dictionary:
"tweet, n. and int. An imitation of the note of a small bird. Also repeated."
"Hence tweet v. trans., to utter in this way, to twitter; also transf." [my emphasis]
It's been standard English since the middle of the 19th century. With variant spellings it goes back at least as far as the 16th century.
Re:How about google... (Score:3, Informative)
The verb google has already been added the new Merriam-Webster dictionary.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google [merriam-webster.com]
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:Gained respect for NYT (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:1, Informative)
Considering the definition: "to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters" [reference.com], it is in fact quite correct to use "tweet" in reference to "Twitter" in this case.
Re:Thank God (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A weak chirping sound (Score:1, Informative)
A better analogy would be referring to "driving" as "Fording," or perhaps "e-mails" as "AOL-grams." Ugh.
Re:Thank God (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Gained respect for NYT (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
Re:A weak chirping sound (Score:4, Informative)
"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:Thank God (Score:3, Informative)