Showing posts with label oxford dictionary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oxford dictionary. Show all posts

Friday, June 6, 2014

The End of The @EveryWord Era?!

Who would believe that a Twitter handle could get almost 100k followers by posting one word tweets!

But that is exactly what @everyword did!  If you aren't one of its followers, I'll give you the low down on this historic Twitter handle.  

@Everyword was created by NYU professor Adam Parrish, who was actually mocking Twitter a bit when he created the account seven years ago.  The handle is a Twitter-bot and it tweets a word in the dictionary every 30 minutes since its conception on November 30, 2007.  That's it.  Just the word in alphabetical order!  

Somehow, this simple concept has fascinated people and @EveryWord has 98k followers.  And now that the end of the dictionary is coming near, people are scared, sad and curious what will come of @everyword when it gets through the Z's! 

They should have seen it coming, its a moment that has been seven years in the making!! But what is pretty interesting to me about this whole story is the shift in attitude that the @everyword founder has had since the beginning of this experiment.  He told The Guardian in a recent interview: 

"I was a Twitter skeptic.  The way I saw it, people were posting meaningless things, totally out of context.  I wanted to satirize the brevity of Twitter messages would be to make a bot that would post individual words.  But now I see Twitter differently.  It's kind of a magical writing experiment, and it's amazing that so many people participate."

I like that he's come around to appreciating the "magical writing experiment" that is Twitter!! But as for now, we only have a few short days (hours??) until the seven year saga of @everyword ends!!  We are already on "ZY" words!  Have you ever followed this handle?  What do you think it will tweet after the last word??

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

"Tweetable" makes it to The Oxford Dictionary!


LOL. Hashtag. Meme.
 
Social media jargon is getting more and more popular.  But when one of these words is accepted into something like the Oxford Dictionary, things are brought to a whole new level.
 
That's what happened last week with one trendy word: "Tweetable"
 
Here's the link to the ever-so-formal definition, in case you haven't used the word.
 
But let's look into this a little further, The Oxford dictionary defines "tweetable" as: suitable for sharing on the social media site Twitter.
 
Makes sense to us, right?
 
But we aren't the people who are looking up words in the Oxford Dictionary!  If someone is going through the trouble to include more current, tech words in the dictionary, I think they should describe them in a way that is less reliant on tech knowledge.  Is someone who looks up "Tweetable" going to know what "Twitter" is?  Probably not.
 
I say either define it in layman's terms or don't define it at all.  After all, I can't stand when I look up a word I don't know and then part of the word is referenced in the definition. This might not be exactly the same issue, but it's similar!
 
Congrats to "tweetable" for becoming a real word!  But a big question mark goes to Oxford Dictionary for their partially self-referencing definition.
 
How would you best define "tweetable"?