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The Keep youp English up to date podcast from BBCLearningEnglish.com in this episode, John Ato explores the origins and uses of the word tweet.
Tweet Are you a tweeter?
If so, you're now one of close on a hundred million people around the world.
The Twitter phenomenon, which started in California in 2006, has in four short years thoroughly embedded itself in humanity's communication systems.
In case you're one of the few people who have never heard of it, it's an Internet social networking site which enables users to communicate with others by means of text based messages of up to 140 characters.
Its founder, Jack Dorsey, wanted a name for it that suggested the trembling vibrations of a ringing phone, and he came up with Twitter.
The main meaning of that word is of course, the small, quiet, repeated sounds made by birds.
And when people wanted to refer to an individual Twitter message, there was another very similar English word of nearly identical meaning, ready and waiting.
Tweet.
This first appeared as a noun in 2007 and the verb soon followed, meaning to send a Twitter message, as in hundreds of people tweeted her after her article appeared in the newspaper.
If you're a keen tweeter, then you're a member of the twitterati, a coinage based on literati, a collective name for well read intellectuals, and probably also on glitterati, meaning all the glamorous people.
Not quite such a successful product of all this verbal invention though is Twitpick, the name of a website that enables you to send pictures via Twitter, which for British speakers at least, calls to mind Twit, meaning a silly person.
That was the keep your English up to date podcast.
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