For word nerds, Twitter’s rebrand is for the birds

Bad news: It’s time to throw out your dictionary. The poor thing is outdated … again.

Elon Musk broke it. Add it to the list along with the SpaceX Starship, self-immolating Teslas, and all of Twitter.

Dictionary editors went out on a tree limb for Twitter, which launched in 2006. Typically, they like to wait until a word has been in circulation for at least a decade before adding it — doing so prevents flash-in-the-pan neologisms from receiving more credit than they’re due.

When Merriam-Webster added the verb tweet in 2011, and Oxford English Dictionary followed suit in 2013, they believed the word wasn’t going anywhere.

Now in 2023, Twitter is no more. In one of the more head-scratching rebrandings in history, Twitter has become X, and tweet no longer sings as a verb.

Of course, the bird sense of tweet has been around a lot longer. It was first used as a verb in the mid-19th century and as a noun 300 years before that. Now the word is once again just for the birds.

Dictionaries have adapted with increasing rapidity to technological changes. Google cofounder Larry Page had the first documented use of google as a verb in 1998, and both Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary added it in 2006 — eight years later.

That same year, Oxford English Dictionary added the verb photoshop, which had been in use as a verb since 1992, after an initial 1990 release of the photo-editing software. Merriam-Webster added it two years later, in 2008.

Word nerds have reacted with varying levels of consternation to this quicker rate of language change; I remember attending a copy-editing seminar in the late 2000s, at which attendees were aghast that YouTube might be used as a verb.

For tweet to be added to the dictionary only four years after its launch was a major feather in its cap. It’s every brand’s dream to have your product become part of the lexicon: Think about how often you lowercase band-aid, crock-pot, kleenex, or dumpster, all of which were born as product names. Even heroin, when it was first introduced to the dictionary in 1898, was capitalized as a trademarked drug manufactured by Bayer.

Since tweet entered the dictionary, Merriam-Webster has broken its own record for fastest entry: In 2020, COVID-19 went from coinage to official entry in just 35 days — a stark reminder of how quickly everything changed when we all had to suddenly slow down.

We can’t necessarily fault dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and Oxford English Dictionary for making moves as early as they did. Most modern dictionaries are descriptive, which means they describe how language is used, and technology has enabled faster and more widespread language change than ever before.

But the dead bird shows just how treacherous such a move can be. Rather than tweeting, will we start “Xing”? Will tweet live on as a zombie verb, continuing to describe our online actions even after its feathered head was cut off?

Or maybe, if we’re lucky, X will follow the precedent of its owner’s unmanned spaceship and it will just blow up — at which point the only noise we’ll hear will be the dulcet singing of the birds.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and determiners to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.