Why You Won't Find Us on Twitter

 

Because Twitter is stupid.

One of the many reasons why you should be embarrassed
to be associated with Twitter.

 
While I haven't paid much (any) attention to Twitter since its creation, my hunch is that the majority of what goes on there falls into one of two general categories: (1) events in which you are (or were, or will be, or want to be) involved, or (2) thoughts you’ve had, or heard from others, that you’ve decided are worth sharing.

First, the events: if anything that happens to you can be satisfactorily summed up in 140 or fewer characters, what chance does it have of being genuinely worth telling people about? Answer: very slim. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but the odds are good that most of the details from the average life that are worth broadcasting to total strangers are either completely made up or stolen from a movie. The following are some completely-true examples from my everyday life:

1. I once beat the Queen of England in a belching contest. She was kicking my ass until she got a bit overconfident and barfed a little.
2. I am in a ballroom surrounded by hundreds of monkeys in tuxedoes. I can’t tell which ones are millionaires and which ones are butlers. 
3. The penguins, surprisingly, are dressed quite casually.
4. I ate a whole lot of fiberglass insulation. It wasn't cotton candy like that man said. My stomach’s itchy.¹

Be honest, how often does a mundane detail of somebody else’s humdrum life really interest you? Probably not many. Your mundane details aren’t likely to be any more interesting to anybody else.
 

Second, thoughts: if anything you think can be satisfactorily summed up in 140 or fewer characters, odds are good that you’re a profoundly shallow thinker or just straight-up stupid.² There are notable exceptions to this, of course; some very clever people were also quite pithy:

1. I think, therefore I am. (R. Descartes)
2. The needs of the many far outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. (Spock)
3. If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you. (O. Wilde)
4. C is for cookie; that good enough for me. (C. Monster)

The obvious problem here is that you are not Rene Descartes or Oscar Wilde, and neither is anybody you know. (For that matter, I’m no Oscar Wilde either, although I do have this nifty blog and he doesn’t.³)

Thanks in part to the recent death of Mark Twain,⁴ the quality of wit in this country has fallen to the point that we’re apparently willing to believe that bumper stickers are clever. That probably helps explain (to some degree) the success of Twitter. And it’s not surprising that, given our country’s obsession with even the most run-of-the-mill celebrities, that plenty of people out there are just dying to know, say, whether Ashton Kutcher’s jock itch has cleared up yet. But those two still-pathetic reasons aside, I have a hard time understanding why we believe that it’s anything but embarrassing to circulate statements like, for example, “he might be f—— you but he’s thinking of me.”


. . . although that may be a bad example. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that it’s probably a direct quote from Oscar Wilde.

NOTES

1. Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, 2004.

2. For the record, this shallow and straight-up stupid post weighs in at exactly 2,926 characters, not including the title or spaces. That’s way more than 140—put that in your ass and smoke it, Twitter fans!

3. Also, he’s been dead for 110 years, and I have not.

4. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, b. 1835, d. 1910.

Mangled English

Part 1 of a Potentially Infinite Series

“You don’t want to be a draft pick that should have did something but never did nothing.”

—John Wall, University of Kentucky basketball player

While we admire John Wall’s apparent dedication to living up to his lofty status as the first overall pick in 2010’s NBA draft, it bothers us a bit that one of the somethings that he clearly should have did was to pay better attention during English class—especially the parts that dealt with verb agreement and double negatives.

It bothers us more, though, that if John Wall has even a middling NBA career—and from what we’ve read, he’ll probably be a star—his fifteen to twenty years’ worth of newspaper quotes, postgame radio and TV interviews, and locker-room or mid-game Twitter postings¹ will likely allow him to have more of an impact on American English than all his dedicated, learned, and heartbroken English teachers (past, present, and future) put together.

Sigh.

We don’t follow college or professional basketball, so for all we know, Wall is a bright, erudite young man who’s merely gotten off to a rough start as an interviewee. We suppose it’s better to be optimistic than to wonder if  perhaps Wall’s never doing nothing is the best we can hope for.

NOTE

1. We realize that Twitter postings are generally referred to as “tweets,” but for the time being, we’re going to refuse to use that word. First of all, it’s a stupid word regardless of context—stupider even than “cuddle.” Second, Twitter may well be the most pointless and narcissistic activity in the history of the human race—even more so than blogging, although the competition is closer than we care to admit—and we don’t want to show it any inadvertent support by adopting its silly vocabulary.

Much Ado About Twitties

Where were you when you first heard about Meghan McCain's backlash against those who criticized her for showing some cleavage on Twitter? Go to her Twitter page. Miss it? So did I, until Some Guy turned me on to it. When it comes to spotting the heavy-hitting cleavage issues that define our era, they don't come much better than Some Guy! Anyway, Miss McCain is all aflutter about her tweeters causing such a firestorm, initially threatening to stop using Twitter (the horror!) then backing down and simply being indignant.

Where to start? Well first of all, when did it become a crime for a sexy woman to look demurely sexy? Gazongas are nice, and no one will ever make me change my opinion on that. The more boobs in society the better, I've always said. Women, go ahead and show them as much as you want. Especially you Meghan - they look pretty good.

The real issue here is Twitter, and the self-righteous people who follow "celebrities" on that site. Yes, I just used the written form of those annoying quote fingers in the air. Deal! The "celebrities" that people follow, from the intelligently interesting to the spectacularly loserly, do not care what you think. Why would they? They use the site as a publicity vehicle, that's it. Do you really care what Dane Cook is doing at any particular moment? Please open the door and find a new life somewhere out there if you really do.

Further, I suggest it is the height of hypocrisy for such celebrities to mundanely post on Twitter whatever they are thinking at the time, posting TwitPics of whatever they want at the time, and then later becoming defensive when some people choose to dislike what the celebrity put out there. Twitter is just the latest technological expression of the ego, and does it better than anything previously invented. Grow up "celebrities", stop putting your life out there like dirty laundry for the public to see and your neighbors to complain about it. At least if you do, stop complaining about it.

I like the twitties, not the Twitters. We need way more of the former, and many fewer of the latter. And yes, I realize that the second-best outlet for the ego is the blog. Self-loathing is on the menu for later, although if this was all about my ego wouldn't it not be anonymous?