New Twitter Terms

Jan 6

Written By Amy Newman

New York Magazine has published new terms that emerged on Twitter in 2013. I did my best to summarize them here:

Canoe: a Twitter conversation involving more than three people
Close that tab: advice to close a browser tab quickly because of something terrible
Darth: a wizard with a lot of fans
Day-of-the-week jokes: blaming a day on something bad or tweeting "TGIF" on another day
#deblasionew york: blaming everything on NY's new mayor, even before he took office
Doge: a meme that I don't understand at all (!)
First-name-only replies: calling someone out on Twitter
Florida man: attributing strange happenings to someone in Florida ("the weirdest state")
Hatefave: favoriting a tweet to "ruffle the recipient's feathers"
Hateread: encouraging people to read something distasteful
@Horse_ebooks: a poetic thread made up of short contributions
Scoop, if true: encouraging retweets/reporting without regard to truth
Smarm: performance without substance
Subtweet: directed at one tweeter (back-talking)
Teach the homeless code: based on an experiment considered in poor taste
Whoa: emphasizing another's tweet
"You won't believe what happened next": a way to encourage clicks

And my two favorites of the bunch with examples:

Because [noun/preposition]: "A new type of prepositional phrase, because character limits." Why waste words (I guess)?

#Followateen: parents writing about their kids (until they discovered the hashtag and retaliated). Ouch. I wrote about "literally" recently.

Discussion Starters:

Do you find these interesting or, as one comment on the story says, "Twitter is dumb."
Another comment on the story reads, "This must be what's popping on #WhiteTwitter. Because #BlackTwitter tells a different story." What does this mean, and do you agree with the comment?

Marissa Mayer Gives CES Keynote