August 5, 2017

Sick bastards.

Today I learned that the original use of the verb "to tweet" to refer to using Twitter was: "Got the new phone, so you can tweet me again, you sick bastards!"
Posted by Ann Althouse at 8:51 AM
Tags: , ,

6 comments:

rhhardin said...

Tweed never became a verb.

What a bird with a cold does.

8/5/17, 9:28 AM
Ann Althouse said...

"Tweed" is" A trade name originating in an accidental misreading of tweel, Scots form of twill."

And twill (and tweel) are used as verbs:

"To weave so as to produce diagonal ridges on the surface of the cloth."

1808–18 J. Jamieson Etymol. Dict. Sc. Lang. To..tweel, v.a., to work cloth in such a manner, that the woof appears to cross the warp vertically.
1828 W. Carr Dial. Craven (ed. 2) Twill, to weave in a particular manner.
1839 A. Ure Dict. Arts 1231 Florentine silks are tweeled with sixteen leaves.
1870 D. Rock Textile Fabrics (1876) vii. 73 Fustian..with a warp of linen thread and a woof of thick cotton, so twilled and cut that it showed on one side a thick but low pile.

OED.

8/5/17, 10:19 AM
Danno said...

My idea of tweeting-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvTnrQYRXdY

8/5/17, 11:27 AM
Viva Maria said...

~
Huh? I came here to be redirected to another blog post about a Tweet? And I thought the title of this blog thread tweetingly excited my momentary narcissism (okay: it’s a stable and fixed trait) to be called by my proper name - “Sick Bastard”? Is this how easy it is to hook in my words-are-idling traffic? Playing Sylvester to Tweety and foiled again? Does my Obamacare cover my blog confusion?

8/5/17, 11:52 AM
Craig said...

Is the OED a good source to claim the origin of a word, as opposed to the just finding a verified early usage? (It'd help if the OED was publicly linkable here, maybe.)

8/5/17, 4:26 PM
Ann Althouse said...

It's very reliable as identifying the earliest appearance in print, but that's usually not the invention of the word.

By the way, did you know that Thomas Jefferson coined the word "belittle"?

8/5/17, 8:43 PM

Post a Comment

Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.