I came across an article on The Huffington Post which included a line of prose so well crafted, it could make readers all across the country spit coffee on their keyboards.
In this post, John Tepper Marlin reports on the rising use of Twitter with this gem of grammatical genius:
I do a Google search and find Twitter users exceed 200,000 per day, firing out 3 million Tweets – a mind-blowing average of 15 Tweets per Twit. It’s like the invention of the machine gun. No one is safe any more.
“15 Tweets per Twit.” Good-Google, that’s Funny!
Note the double meaning of the word “Twit”. The use of such phrasing is the art of comedy, and what separates a good writer from the rest of the keyboard monkeys out there.
The Free Dictionary defines such a phrase as within the realm of Double Entendre:
A Device of deliberately using an ambiguous word or phrase, that often has a coarse or indelicate connotation.
Things like this are subject to much worry for marketers. Twitter may indeed be the hottest social networking trend of 2009, but how long will it last, if users decide they prefer not to be associated as “Twits”?
In retrospect, maybe “Witter” would have been a better name.
