Guest Blog Post by @Danacea

Recently I used the word twactic as a throwaway quip in a tweet. Inexplicably, this landed me blog love and a place in the Twitter twiki twictionary… and left me amazed at how something so simple had made such an impact.

Haven’t we done this to death? I mean…

Twusts - The things you can tell in confidence to twitter friends - precisely because you’ve never met them

Twabbit - Potential contact tracked down through Summize (as in: be vewy, vewy qwiet…)

TWAT - Acronym for Twitter Weapons and Tactics - the art of using your account to promote your brand. (Why, what were you thinking I meant?)

Twagic - Losing 15 followers and instantly becoming paranoid

Twigger - The tweet that touches a nerve and explodes you into a seething mass of fury

Twaturation - The chatty types are awake

Twechie - The guy who has 10,000 followers, yet tweets only techspeak and that rarely

Twalker - The creepy guy who follows 40 people, all of them women - yet never speaks.

Twouch! - The moment of horror when you see your last DM in the public timeline

Twelief - Understanding the DM wasn’t one of yours

Twincing - Realizing the person you had IM sex with last night is going to make pointed public remarks for the next three days

Twit - Feeling like one

This list can go on and on… feel free to add your own.

Twitter is—what?—eighteen months old? It’s growing by the day, its tantrums are getting worse—I guess this means it isn’t a baby any more—and that means its language skills are developing rapidly. Twitter-branding words by putting a ‘t’ and a ‘w’ in front of them is getting as annoying as txtspk… We’re a smart bunch; if we, in our microcosm, are going to develop our own linguistic structure, then I think it’s time we took a step up the evolutionary ladder.

Before we end up with an in-joke that no-one else understands.

Twalliteration is a one-twick pony. Let’s expand our horizons.

Maybe something in a vowel…

Danie Ware is behind the PR, marketing, and event organizing for Forbidden Planet (London).

If you’ve enjoyed Danie’s guest post on digital culture, please consider reading her fiction at:

danieware.googlepages.com

Or Danie’s blog at:

I’m a professional on- and off-line Marketeer for Forbidden Planet London as well as being a Mum, a keen cyclist and weight-trainer, an old school geek, a bit of a longhair and a social media convert. This is my professional and personal thoughts, stream-of-consciousness style.