Who came UP with this?!?
Sep. 21st, 2010 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaunthieA great deal of my professional life is spent in the realm of TLAs (that's "three-letter-acronyms" for you non-jargonites), obscure technical terms, and random bits of cobbled-together verbiage. It's not all that surprising, really; we're often trying to describe concepts and coin terms for things that have never existed before. Acronyms and new words are the inevitable consequence of trying to conjure new things into existence.
That being said, there are limits. Sometimes we techies do a good job creating a new word or acronym. "WWW" (for World Wide Web) isn't bad, as these things go. "Version control" gives you at least an inkling of what it is by its very name, as does "router." "Virtual machine" not only tells you what it is, it has a decent acronym (VM).
And then, sometimes, we suck.
A regular offender in the suck wars, IMHO, is Twitter. It's a cute name for the site, I'll grant you that, and given the short name of the infobursts you can produce, it's even apropos. I vehemently dislike the misappropriation of the words "tweet" and "tweeting" but I can accept their utility.
But THIS? This is EPIC fail.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in case you haven't already stumbled across it, I give you twibe.
Yes, you read that right.
Twibe.
From the twitter help: "A twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic who communicate with each other. On each twibe’s page, there is a list of twibe members."
Okay, fine and dandy. You can parse the antecedents of the term easily enough; "twitter" and "tribe." But I defy ANYONE to read that description aloud WITHOUT sounding exactly like Elmer Fudd.
Go on.
I dare ya.
Yeah, I thought as much. EPIC FAIL. Really, world, we can do so much better than this.
That being said, there are limits. Sometimes we techies do a good job creating a new word or acronym. "WWW" (for World Wide Web) isn't bad, as these things go. "Version control" gives you at least an inkling of what it is by its very name, as does "router." "Virtual machine" not only tells you what it is, it has a decent acronym (VM).
And then, sometimes, we suck.
A regular offender in the suck wars, IMHO, is Twitter. It's a cute name for the site, I'll grant you that, and given the short name of the infobursts you can produce, it's even apropos. I vehemently dislike the misappropriation of the words "tweet" and "tweeting" but I can accept their utility.
But THIS? This is EPIC fail.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in case you haven't already stumbled across it, I give you twibe.
Yes, you read that right.
Twibe.
From the twitter help: "A twibe is a group of Twitter users interested in a common topic who communicate with each other. On each twibe’s page, there is a list of twibe members."
Okay, fine and dandy. You can parse the antecedents of the term easily enough; "twitter" and "tribe." But I defy ANYONE to read that description aloud WITHOUT sounding exactly like Elmer Fudd.
Go on.
I dare ya.
Yeah, I thought as much. EPIC FAIL. Really, world, we can do so much better than this.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 02:21 am (UTC)