Elon Musk Is Making Dictionary Editors Refund the 'Tweet' to Birds! Any Lessons to Learn?😏 (Infographic)

Until Jack Dorsey stole this word for his new company Twitter in 2006, 'Tweet' was the language of birds, exclusively. And that is what the Miriam-Webster Dictionary understood the word to mean: 

...a chirping note.

Oxford Dictionary defines it thus: 

...when birds tweet, they make a series of short, high sounds.

 

Perhaps lexicographers from the Oxford English Dictionary have been harassed by internet culture together with its rapidly spreading slang and lingo. For how else would you explain that they suspended their thorough process of adding new words to the age-old dictionary, just to add a new meaning to the word "tweet" in 2013?

Their chief editor at the time John Simpson did explain, or confess, that 

"“Tweet” was added in spite of its newness." 

They hastened the word into the dictionary, bypassing a long-standing tradition of allowing new words to go around the world for a minimum of 10 years, to confirm if it is here to last before editing the Dictionary for it. 

In fact, in the Oxford Dictionary's definition of the word "Tweet" online, the meaning of making a post on Twitter comes first, before the meaning of bird sounds. Is this disrespectful to our winged co-habitants? I think it is, though the birds don't mind.

In fact, at this moment of writing, September 1, 2023, both the Oxford and Miriam-Webster dictionaries have not been updated, more than 2 weeks after the word 'Tweet' had been officially returned to the original owners.

My question is, what was it with the 'excitement'? 

Check the Infographic at the bottom of this article,...

…you will find how tough it is to qualify a new word to be added to dictionaries. It is tougher than the difficult exercise of getting a new Wikipedia topic (talk about that among Jabborro PR services here).

Elon Musk

Well, the Dictionary will have to be edited again, thanks or 'No Thanks' to Elon Musk. If you use his new toy 'X', you would have seen that since early August 2023, they have begun to phase out the use of the word 'Tweet' from the platform, replacing it with the more generic word 'post'. 'Retweet' is being replaced by 'repost'.

There goes our favorite, playful online verb! 

At first, we were sending SMS messages from person to person directly. Then came 'Twttr' before, years ago, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams bought two vowels for about $7,500 each, to complete the word 'Twitter', buying the domain name from a bird enthusiast, according to AP News.

12 Other Fancy Terms Recruited Recently

There are other words, abbreviations, and slangs that appear to have been hurriedly co-opted into the American Dictionary, courtesy of emerging earthly phenomena, especially within the Tech-social hemisphere.

Baller: excellent, exciting, or extraordinary especially in a way that is suggestive of a lavish lifestyle

Metaverse 1 computing: a persistent virtual (see VIRTUAL sense 2) environment that allows access to and interoperability of multiple individual virtual realities also: any of the individual virtual environments that make up a metaverse 2 cosmology: the hypothetical combination of all co-existing or sequentially existing universes

FWIW: abbreviation for what it’s worth.

ICYMI: abbreviation in case you missed it.

Gift Economy: a system in which goods and services are given freely between people rather than sold or bartered.

Shrinkflation: the practice of reducing a product's amount or volume per unit while continuing to offer it at the same price.

Altcoin: any of various cryptocurrencies that are regarded as alternatives to established cryptocurrencies and especially to Bitcoin.

False negative: a person or test result that is incorrectly classified as negative (as for the presence of a health condition) because of imperfect testing methods or procedures

False positive: a person or test result that is incorrectly classified as positive (as for the presence of a health condition) because of imperfect testing methods or procedures

LARP: a live-action role-playing game in which a group of people enacts a fictional scenario (such as a fantasy adventure) in real time typically under the guidance of a facilitator or organizer (verb, LARPER, and LARPING also have new entries)

Level up: to advance or improve (oneself, someone else, or something) in or as if in a game

Meatspace: the physical world and environment especially as contrasted with the virtual world of cyberspace.

Uduak Umo is a Public Relations specialist and founder of a few businesses.