Business Opportunities Weblog

New York Times Bans The Word “Tweet”

By on June 11, 2010 in News

The Slate is reporting that the Gray Lady will no longer tweet. That’s according to the New York Times’ standards editor Phil Corbett, who is pleading with writers to avoid using the word in their copy whenever possible, invoking the paper’s disdain for “colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon.”

There are tweet partisans: The Associated Press gave tweet its blessing in the most recent edition of its style guide, and the American Dialect Society listed tweet as its “word of the year” for 2009 (though that label is less an honorific than a reflection of widespread use).

Corbett suggests replacing tweet with chirp. He also proposes the following “deft, English alternatives”:
use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

Photo by HolyKaw.

media twitter

Rich Whittle has added 6,226 posts to Business Opportunities Weblog.

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  • http://www.buildingcontent.highercontent.com Collier Ward

    My daughters dog’s name is Neologism (“Neo” for short).
    How dare the Times have “disdain for… neologisms”!

  • http://wahm.business-opportunities.biz Angela Shupe

    What’s their problem with the word “tweet”? English isn’t a dead language, so what’s the point of fighting something that has obviously taken root? Or are they simply mad that they didn’t come up with it first?

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