You know, I’m surprised at our English language. We used to discourage the word but and ain’t wasn’t suitable for some people’s ears. However everyone seems to use the word ’Twitter'like it has existed in the Oxford dictionary since the beginning of time.
I hear it in TV programmes, forums and even in the news, but I nearly choked on my coffee on reading this article on Sky News, where NY Times editor Phil Corbett has banned the word ’Twitter'in articles. Mr. Corbett has taken an Old School approach, after it was used 18 times in articles in the past month, clearly he prefers formal and posh words in his articles, like amused or glycolic peel. He calls the word “inherently silly”and has even told his writers not to use the ’T-word.’
With regards to the ’T-word’, Mr. Corbett says “Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, ’tweet'has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.”and also adding with regards to such words placed in his articles “Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon.”
It seems that the humble newspaper article is reaching out to its younger, social-networking fans, Twitter (dare I say it!) is up there with Facebooking (adding someone on Facebook) and Googling (searching something online). I swear by Twitter, Facebook and Google as they dominate my internet life, and I’m really not surprised that they seem to have found their way into the English Language. So what if they are new words and didn’t exist twenty years ago? Neither did the word email and no one has turned up their nose.
