New Twitter Terms

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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)?

 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?