Resuming where we left off (part 1 , part 2), here are more words that we need in the age of Twitter and blogs.
#17 The feeling of elation when writing an IM which you know is approaching 140 characters, your fingers start to tense but you go past it and nothing happens, nothing turns red, and you suddenly feel so free to express yourself. Also works on IRC.
#18 The art of calibrating how many hints you should put that there is a joke/punt/double-entendre in your tweet. Some jokes are best delivered with a straight face (e.g. without a smiley or a #humor tag). And readers derived more pleasure from less obvious jokes. But the risk is that the joke will go completely unnoticed as people hurriedly scan their timelines.
#19 The trauma of temporarily switching back to a “feature phone” (e.g. a basic clamshell) while waiting for the replacement of a broken smartphone to arrive. In response to this request, Lori MacVittie suggested “retrotrauma” which I like a lot though I may shorten it to “retrauma” or “retroma”.
#20 The intuition that the thought you just had is original enough to interest your readers but probably not originally enough to not have been tweeted already. The quasi-certitude that doing a twitter search on it would find previous occurrences, thereby making you an involuntary plagiarist. The refusal to perform such search (in violation of the “Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you Speak” adage) before writing your tweet. Or, on the other side, the abandon of a tweet idea based on the assumption that it’s already out there. E.g. I could think of a few jokes on the HP “invent” tagline in the wake of Mark Hurd’s resignation (“HP Invent… business expenses”) but didn’t bother, based on the assumption that these tweets were already doing the rounds.
#21 A brand, especially a personal one, (e.g. twitter ID, domain name…) that has aged badly because it uses a now-out-of-favor buzzword. Like, soon enough, everything with “Cloud” in it. I still remember, over 10 years later, laughing out loud when I heard a KQED radio program sponsored by Busse Design USA who was inviting us to visit them at “myBDUPortal.com”. This was in the late nineties when “portals” where the hot thing on the Internet (as well as the “my” prefix, when Yahoo and others got into personalization). I am happy to see that they are now using a much more reasonable domain name but Yahoo’s calcified directory still bears witness of their hubris. Look for Busse Design on this listing.
# 22 Someone who has never been on-line. I don’t personally feel the need for a new term for this, but we have to find an alternative to this most unfortunate and ambiguous coinage: “digital virgins” (as in “30 percent of Europeans are ‘digital virgins'”)
#23 Chris Hoff wanted a term to describe “someone who tries to escape from the suffocating straight jacket of disingenuousness exposed by their own Twitter timeline.” His proposal: “tweetdini”
As always, submissions are welcome in the comments if you think you’ve coined the right term for any of these.
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