The Coming Tweepocalypse: A Glossary Of Twerms

Broadsheet’s Mary Elizabeth Williams does a witty takedown of Vanity Fair‘s cantankerous and faux-outraged piece on “twilebrities.” But really, both left us feeling that there just aren’t enough silly neologisms beginning with tw-. A new twexicon, after the jump.

Coining silly words has become pretty much de rigueur for the many Luddite pundits who take Twitter as the latest sign of the end-times. VF‘s Vanessa Grigoriadis — whom Williams describes as “otherwise sometimes insightful” — displays typical doomsaying laziness when she writes, “Those of us who still read are hoping this is a jump-the-shark moment – could [Twitter] be the Internet’s version of reality TV?” Omg u r rite i dont read anymor n also my only family iz LOLcatz!!11! But what really brands “America’s Tweethearts” as the latest in a long series of formulaic denunciations is its title, and sentences like this one: “Twilebrities are people-‘tweeple,’ in twitspeak-who spend their days typing 140-character messages into a digital rumpus room of about 55 million monthly users.” Twhy don’t we just twalk like this all the twime? Seriously, it’s obvious that for the destruction of the American intellect and the replacement of all discourse by 140-word misspelled fragments (Grigoriadis: “Twitter doesn’t even require real sentences”) to be complete, we need even more twords to play with. To twhit:

tweehard: someone who loves Miranda July, Belle and Sebastian, and cardigan sweaters with owl appliqués.

tweener: someone who tweets a lot about Miley Cyrus (example: Miley Cyrus).

twizzlers: a delicious snack to eat at the movies.

tweaker-tweeter: 1. someone who tweets while on meth. 2. a kid with a lisp on Halloween.

Twainspotting: the practice of pointing out people who look like Samuel Clemens.

twack marks: weeping sores on the fingers from too much tweeting.

twend piece: any article that uses the above twerms.

OMG! VF Discovers “Tweethearts”! [Broadsheet]
America’s Tweethearts [Vanity Fair]