What’s the past participle of twit?

My close companion Backside has gone and done it. I was recently distracted by cherished colleagues’ voluptuous verses and he went and registered me at Twitter. Oldjanus@Oldjanus, as you might expect.

If you ever feel like following me, you’d better hurry because I can’t deal with more than a few thousand at once. Not that I’m saying much. It’s all very social, innit?

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Author: Janus

Hey! I'm back ...... and front

21 thoughts on “What’s the past participle of twit?”

  1. Twat! 😀 Nothing personal, but I won’t be following. I don’t do ‘social’ at the best of times, nor Twatter or MyFaceBook.com ever. Harrumpfff!

    OZ

  3. Mornin’ Soutie. Why should anyone need Twatter when they can hop on and off the Chariot at will?

    OZ

  4. Morning OZ, precisely, how he’s going to get by with only 140 characters is beyond me 🙂

    Changing topic, I saw the word spectatorship on my TV on Sunday, it was a caption giving the attendance at the Irish Open held at Royal Port Rush, spectatorship? New one on me!

  5. New one to me too. Probably an Americanism – they never could speak the lingo. Here I spend several useful hours per week teaching English to ‘foreigners’. Last week some minutes passed whilst I explained the difference between your and you’re, a subtle issue lost on many native English speakers but at least my students won’t ever make that mistake.

    OZ

  6. [pedant mode]
    Hate to widdle on you guys’ parade, but the verb used to describe using Twitter is “tweet” so the past participle is “tweeted” 🙂
    [/pedant mode]

  7. Soutie, I am sure that with Janus’s ‘gadfly’ approach to comments, 140 characters is more than enough for him to express his deepest thoughts. 🙂

    As for dodgy words, I came across this the other day. ‘Harrassive’ to describe the level of aggression with which charity muggers approached the public. It was used by a Swedish chugger being interviewed by the Telegraph. I am currently reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire trilogy. While the ideas in the book are brilliant and entertaining, the standard of writing and much of the vocabulary used point to the origins of the author who grew up in New York with Russian/Yiddish immigrant parents. While Asimov learned English as a child, you can imagine that living in a foreign community where English was a second or even 3rd language, many terms were translated literally from Russian into English and that some of the finer points of grammar were set aside. Although some of the words he uses grate at first, one can see that they actually work within the context that they are used. I knew immediately what the Swede meant when he talked about being more harassive than others.

  10. Janus: You will fit right in on Twitter, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton an’ all.

    Sipu: The Foundation Series grew to four books in 1982, with “Foundation’s Edge” and “Foundation and Earth” was added in 1986, they are all good reads. There may even be more but I could not find copies of them on my shelves. I may have mentioned this before, I once met Asimov, about twenty years ago, he was a classmate of my neighbor at Columbia, he was an interesting and talented man

  11. The verb “to twit” means to tease someone or make a joke of them and the past tense is “twitted”.

  15. Birds tweet, someone should ‘lime the branches’!
    Janus, never thought you’d ‘lose it’ in your old age!

  19. Greetings Janus from the heart of COland. It’s the Blue Lagoon today on her personal recommendation.

    Well tweeted on Twitter (and well tweaked hereon). Good to see that your first tweet was an apostrophic reproof of somebody who should have known better.

    I;m almost tempted to sign up myself so that I can double your number of followers at a stroke. Smiley thing.

  20. Sipu :

    I see Bob Diamond’s daughter Nell has been tweeting. She invited Osborne and Ed Balls to ‘HMD’, whatever that means. I bet her father is not thrilled.

    HMD is Merkin teenage slang for Hold my D***. No, not Dandelion!! 🙂

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