BBC Learning English Keep Your English Up To Date 23rd June 2009 Tweet

Keep Your English Up To Date © British Broadcasting Corporation 2009 Page 1 of 2

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'Tweet'. The booming popularity of online social networking sites has given the English

language a bumper crop of new words. Although some of these sites, and the words

associated with them, may prove to be short-lived, here today and gone tomorrow, there are

others, such as Facebook (see Series 4) which seem to be here to stay.

The latest ‘big thing’ in the world of digital media is Twitter, a social networking site which

began back in 2006 and has been growing ever since. Users post short ‘micro-blogs’

(messages) called ‘tweets’ - T-W-E-E-T-S - from their mobile phone or computer to let other

people know what they’re doing or to ask a question.

The difference between these and a normal text message or email is that a ‘tweet’ is ‘out

there’ in cyberspace, no more than 140 characters long and can be read or answered by

anybody on the network. Just like the words ‘google’ and ‘facebook’, ‘tweet’ can be used as a

noun or a verb. Twitter is increasingly used for market research, so many companies are now

asking themselves ‘To tweet or not to tweet?’

The popularity of Twitter grew after it was used by US presidential candidates before the

2008 election to keep their ‘followers’ up to date – Barack Obama had hundreds of thousands

of followers during the election campaign, although he seemed to stop tweeting shortly after

the election. I guess he must have been quite busy!

Twitter has spawned a number of related words such as ‘twestival’ (a gathering organised on

Twitter) and ‘twirgin’ (someone who is new to Twitter or a first-time user). In fact, if you see

an unfamiliar word which starts with a TW- prefix, it’s probably a new word coined by the

Twitter community. Some of these words may not make it into the dictionaries, but Twitter

seems set to live on.

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Jim Pettiward has a BA (hons) in French and Spanish, CTEFLA and Trinity TESOL Diploma.

He has taught EFL, EAP, ESP and Business English in Ecuador, Venezuela, Hungary and the

UK. He has also worked as an ICT trainer for the British Council and the University of the

Arts, London. He is currently teaching English for Academic Purposes in the Department of

Humanities, Arts, Languages and Education at London Metropolitan University.