Yes, I’m writing about Twitter again. (Or as I call it now, Xitter, pronounced Shitter. Thank you, James Fallows.) This time I’m poking my s’more fork into the dumpster fire that is that company’s new tagline, introduced abruptly and ill-advisedly last weekend. Read all about the inane “Blaze your glory!” [sic].
My previous Twitter-now-X story is here.
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Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.
The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)
It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.
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“Welcome to the age of the cage match,” read the headline on a July 7, 2023, story by Joseph Bernstein in the New York Times. (Free link here.) The subhed: “These days, powerful men want to beat one another. Literally.”
The main event, as Bernstein put it, is between the CEOs of Twitter and Meta. On June 21, Elon Musk (in the Twitter corner) let it be known to his 148 million Twitter followers that he was willing to fight Mark Zuckerberg—CEO of Meta, which launched Twitter rival Threads on July 5—in a “cage match.”
I’m up for a cage match if he is lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023
Musk, who has been at various times in the last two years the world’s richest human, later tweeted that such a match might take place in the Las Vegas Octagon, or on second thought, in Rome’s Colosseum. (The Italian minister of culture reportedly issued an invitation.) He also proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest.” Zuckerberg, a fellow billionaire whose wealth usually places him within grasping distance of Musk, is a student of Brazilian jujitsu. Musk has admitted that he almost never works out.
zuck wins the cage match without ever stepping into the ring pic.twitter.com/f2nLWD80v8
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) July 10, 2023
Chalk it all up to the silly season, or to that male-primate-dominance thing, or to the “it’s just a joke lol” spirit of the age. (Neil Postman nailed it in 1985 with Amusing Ourselves to Death; Emily Nussbaum published a superb update in early 2017, “How Jokes Won the Election.”) In any event, I found myself wondering about the origin and history of cage match.
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I don’t often read sponsored tweets—they’ve gotten especially peculiar and useless since You Know Who took over the joint last year—but a tweet from Fondation L’Oréal, the research-supporting arm of the global cosmetics company, caught my attention last week. One word in particular made me blink: invisibilized.
Promoted tweets no longer have date stamps, and although I captured a screenshot I neglected to save the original link. But this usage wasn’t unique; “invisibilization” showed up frequently throughout Fondation L’Oréal’s messaging in March, International Women’s Month. Here’s another tweet; here’s a LinkedIn post.
I’d never the seen the word, and I wondered whether it was a French import or one of those diversity-equity-inclusion buzzwords like “othering.” The answers, as far as I’ve been able to tell: not likely and maybe, sort of.
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Because my words-of-the-year list couldn’t cover the whole territory, here’s a list of upper-case names that stood out over the past year. For a different take, see Namerology’s name-of-the-year post about Volodymyr, which includes a discussion of language, identity, and spelling.
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Continue reading "Names of the year 2022: Fritinancy edition" »
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Yes, it’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. on November 24. And it’s GivingTuesday—”a global generosity movement unleashing the power of radical generosity”—on November 29. But I haven’t accidentally dropped Thanks or Tuesday. I’m talking instead about “It’s giving [X],” a linguistic happening of its own.
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Now that new Twitter generalissimo Elon Musk—or “Elmo,” as some people are Voldemorting him—has been, um, disrupting the joint, interest has spiked in alternate social-media platforms that aren’t dominated by egomaniacal billionaires with poor impulse control. Platforms like, for example, Mastodon, which launched in 2016 and which brands itself as “social networking that’s not for sale.”
Mastodon logo. The mastodon is an extinct elephantine mammal elephant; its name comes from Greek words meaning “nipple tooth.”
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon isn’t a single platform but “a collection of different, independently-run and self-funded servers,” as Time magazine put it in a November 6 article. This decentralization is a characteristic of the fediverse, a portmanteau of “federated” and “universe.”
— Jen Didn’t Pay Elon $8 Taub (@jentaub) November 6, 2022
No blue birds
No bro bots
No bigots
No billionaire boss
No blue checks
It’s beautiful in the #fediverse in the Mastodon federation of servers https://t.co/wROWW4Go1o
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I’ve been writing about novel coronavirus words for just over a year now. (Remember quarantinis? What happened to all those covidpreneurs?) The latest coronacoinages—thanks to Ben Zimmer for coining that word—reflect a gradually changing reality: a new administration in the White House, increased availability of vaccines, and—underlying it all—the urge to return to something like “normal.”
Here are the words I’ve been tracking lately:
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Sometimes context is everything. And sometimes context won’t help you.
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This month’s book recommendation is Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous. Duchess Goldblatt—Her Grace or DG to her thousands of Twitter followers, myself included—has been an indelible, wholly invented presence on Twitter for some eight years. Her avatar is a 1633 portrait by Frans Hals, and her distinctive voice—firm yet loving, barmy yet authoritative, warm yet tinged with acid—has inspired endless speculation about her “real” identity. You won’t learn that secret from this memoir, but you will learn how the anonymous author (now a woman of perhaps middle age) came to create her, during a terrible period in her life during which she lost her marriage, her house, her job, and most of her friends. The Duchess became her 81-year-old alter ego: an escape from loneliness and an outlet for her considerable writing talent. The book combines memoir with selected DG tweets, and if you choose the audiobook—try your local library system—you’ll enjoy not just the primary narration by Gabra Zackman but also the wonderful actress J. Smith Cameron reading the tweets and singer/songwriter/actor Lyle Lovett reading the Lyle Lovett parts. (Lovett and Her Grace have a mutual admiration society, and if only DG would deign to follow me back on Twitter we could make it a threesome.)
Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.
— Duchess Goldblatt (@duchessgoldblat) December 5, 2017
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Remember when the owner of that professional football team in Washington, DC, said he would NEVER change the team’s name? “Daniel Snyder surely meant NEVER to mean forever,” writes trademark lawyer Steven Baird in Duets Blog, “but in 2013, he could not have foreseen how quickly the world has changed over the last six weeks.” A thorough review of what led up to Snyder’s promised “thorough review of the offending team name.
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