New York Times Bans Use of Word "Tweet" 426
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.
They should probably look at "Googling it," too (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
BBS (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Will Twitter be here in 50 years? Wrong question (Score:2, Interesting)
The question is: Will the New York Times be here in 50 years? [businessinsider.com]
My guess is no. It may not even last ten.
Lawrence Person
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/ [lawrenceperson.com]
http://www.battleswarmblog.com/ [battleswarmblog.com]
Re:He has a point (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Gained respect for NYT (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [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
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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:News flash (Score:3, Interesting)
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:He has a point (Score:3, Interesting)
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:A weak chirping sound (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Gained respect for NYT (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [academia.org.mx]. Catalan / Valenciano has one academy in Barcelona and another in Valencia.
Re:Thank God (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Gained respect for NYT (Score:3, Interesting)
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."