The common phrase for posting on the website he now names X is here to stay, at least for the time being. Elon Musk may wish to send “tweet” back to the birds.
For starters, the term is still widely advertised on the website that was formerly known as Twitter.
If you write a post, you must still click the blue “tweet” button to make it public. You must still select “retweet” to do so.
But it goes beyond that.
With “tweets,” Twitter achieved in a matter of years what few businesses have managed in a lifetime: It cemented itself as a verb and entered both the American and global languages.
Even if it comes from the founder of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the richest men in the world, overturning that requires more than a top-down proclamation.
Language has always been created by the people who use it every day. Additionally, it cannot be created, controlled, or changed in any way. Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal,” said of Twitter’s beginnings, “You don’t get to determine it.
With “tweets,” Twitter achieved in a matter of years what few businesses have managed in a lifetime: It cemented itself as a verb and entered both the American and global languages.
Even if it comes from the founder of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the richest men in the world, overturning that requires more than a top-down proclamation.
Language has always been created by the people who use it every day. Additionally, it cannot be created, controlled, or changed in any way. Nick Bilton, the author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal,” said of Twitter’s beginnings, “You don’t get to determine it.
Twitter wasn’t always called Twitter. Since SMS texting was extremely popular in 2006, when the site started, it was “twttr—a name sans vowels. The iPhone wasn’t released until 2007.
When purchasing the URL for twitter.com from a bird enthusiast, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams “went one day and purchased the vowels—two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,” according to Bilton.
People didn’t “tweet” at first; instead, they would say, “I’m going to tweet this,” according to Bilton. However, “twittered” is not an easy word to say, and “tweet” quickly replaced it, first in the Twitter headquarters, then in San Francisco, and finally worldwide.
We have been using Twitter for well over ten years. World leaders, sports stars, celebrities, and dissidents from oppressive regimes, as well as online propagandists, sex workers, religious figures, meme queens, and real queens
When Donald Trump was president, his inflammatory use of the Twitter app propelled “tweet” into nearly constant headlines. Even those who had never used Twitter were familiar with its meaning.
As of right now, we continue to tweet, retweet, and quote tweets. We also occasionally (maybe not frequently enough) remove tweets. TV shows skim over tweets that are included in news pieces on news websites. No other social network, with the exception of Google, has a word for posting that has become commonplace like tweet,” although Google did the same for “googling.”
Tweet” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011. In 2013, Merriam-Webster followed. It was included in The Associated Press Stylebook in 2010.
According to Jack Lynch, an English professor at Rutgers University who specializes in the history of language, “getting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it.
Because they don’t want things to be just a flash in the pan, dictionaries are typically somewhat reluctant or careful about adding new words, especially for new phenomena.
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