Twitter’s rebrand is for the birds

By renaming the popular social media platform, Elon Musk has confounded dictionary editors who first embraced the verb "tweet" a dozen years ago.

Bad news: It’s time to throw out your dictionary. The poor thing is outdated … again.

Elon Musk broke it. Add it to the list along with the SpaceX Starship, self-immolating Teslas, and all of Twitter.

Dictionary editors went out on a tree limb for Twitter, which launched in 2006. Typically, they like to wait until a word has been in circulation for at least a decade before adding it — doing so prevents flash-in-the-pan neologisms from receiving more credit than they’re due.

When Merriam-Webster added the verb tweet in 2011, and Oxford English Dictionary followed suit in 2013, they believed the word wasn’t going anywhere.

Now in 2023, Twitter is no more. In one of the more head-scratching rebrandings in history, Twitter has become X, and tweet no longer sings as a verb.

Of course, the bird sense of tweet has been around a lot longer. It was first used as a verb in the mid-19th century and as a noun 300 years before that. Now the word is once again just for the birds.

Read the full column on Inquirer.com.