NYT bans 'tweet', 'tweeting' and 'tweeted' from its pages in new style guide ruling

With paywalls and the row over Google's use of newspaper property, journalism seems to be waging a never-ending war with the internet. In the latest skirmish, the notebook-and-pen brigade took another swipe at the technophiles with the decision of the New York Times to ban the word "tweet" from its pages.

Phil Corbett, the standards editor and pedant-in-chief at the US paper, has decreed that "tweet" – the universally accepted verb-noun derived from Twitter – is to be barred, for the heinous crimes of colloquialism, neologism and jargon. Corbett's thinking is simple:

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favour established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.
One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don't; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to 'tweets' or 'tweeting'."

(Paleolithic? That's not a term in regular employment either.) His suggestion is to instead employ "deft, English alternatives", such as "write something on twitter" or "post a twitter update". While neatly suggesting that "tweet" is a word from some unknown language, this suggestion throws up a twillion problems of its own.

For starters, it's just simpler to use one word instead of four. How does "post something on Twitter" sit with the Strunk and White's rules of 1918 on succinct and concise sentence construction? Moreover, if your reader knows what Twitter is, they are almost certainly going to be familiar with tweets.

The New York Times uses Twitter, and with close to 2.5 million followers, it surely appreciates the power of its tweets – sorry – messages posted on Twitter – to their followers. It also uses Tweetdeck to post the majority of their updates. "Tweet"deck, eh?

Imagine the headache that re-tweets are going to cause for the paper's journalists too. Imagine "the post on Twitter regarding Obama's new haircut is estimated to have been posted again by followers more than 10,000 times."

The Guardian style guide ruling on the subject of Twitter is more up to date. "Twitter" and "Twittering" are both upper case, while the low case option is preferred when using "tweets" and "tweeting".

"Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'email'," notes Corbett. Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion".

Well let's hope, for Corbett's sake, that the former doesn't come true. The New York Times readers wouldn't have a clue what their writers were twittering on about.

COURTESY : guardian.co.uk