SAN FRANCISCO (AP) \u2014 Elon Musk may want to send \u201ctweet\u201d back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site\u00a0he now calls X\u00a0is here to stay \u2014 at least for now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says \u201ctweet\u201d to publish it. To repost it, you still tap \u201cretweet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it\u2019s more than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With \u201ctweets,\u201d\u00a0Twitter accomplished\u00a0in just a few years something few companies have done in a lifetime: It became a verb and implanted itself into the lexicon of America and the world.\u00a0Upending that\u00a0takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world\u2019s richest men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLanguage has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. And it can\u2019t be controlled, it can\u2019t be created, it can\u2019t be morphed. You don\u2019t get to decide it,\u201d said Nick Bilton, the author of \u201cHatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal\u201d about Twitter\u2019s origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter didn\u2019t start out as Twitter. It was \u201ctwttr\u201d \u2014 without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. The iPhone only came out in 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams \u201cwent one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially $7,500 each,\u201d when he bought the URL for twitter.com from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the beginning, people didn\u2019t \u201ctweet\u201d \u2014 it was \u201cI\u2019m going to twitter this,\u201d Bilton recalled. But \u201ctwittered\u201d doesn\u2019t roll off the tongue and \u201ctweet\u201d soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve been\u00a0tweeting for well over a decade. World leaders, celebrities and athletes, dissidents in repressive regimes,\u00a0propaganda trolls, sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and actual queens. Former President Donald Trump\u2019s incendiary use of the bird app quickly punted \u201ctweet\u201d into near-constant headlines during his presidency. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For now, we still tweet, retweet and quote tweet, and sometimes \u2014 perhaps not often enough \u2014 delete tweets. News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV programs scroll them. No other social network has a word for posting that\u2019s entered the vernacular like \u201ctweet\u201d \u2014 though Google did the same for \u201cgoogling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Oxford English Dictionary added \u201ctweet\u201d in 2011. Merriam-Webster followed in 2013. The Associated Press Stylebook entered it in 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cGetting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it,\u201d said Jack Lynch, a Rutgers University English professor who studies the history of language. \u201cDictionaries are usually pretty tentative or cautious about letting new words in, especially for new phenomena, because they don\u2019t want things to be just a flash in the pan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Twitter grew into a global communications platform and struggled with misinformation, trolls and hate speech, its friendly brand image remained. The blue bird icon evokes a smile, like the Amazon up-turned-arrow smile \u2014 in contrast to the X that Musk has imposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Martin Grasser was two years out of art school when Twitter hired him for the logo redesign in 2011. His wasn\u2019t the first bird logo for Twitter, but it would be the most enduring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey knew they wanted a bird. So we weren\u2019t starting completely over, but they wanted it to be on par with Apple and Nike. That was really the brief,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter launched Grasser\u2019s design in May 2012; the company went public on Wall Street later that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One early in-house design shown to Grasser looked like \u201ca flying goose with a tail. It looked kind of like a dragon. It was crazy,\u201d he said. Jack Dorsey, another co-founder (and twice-CEO) wanted something simpler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bird represented a vision of Twitter as a friendly place \u201cwhere everyone can weigh in and chat,\u201d Grasser said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe round form evokes a sense of optimism, the bird even being sort of turned upward, as corny as that sounds, I think is different than a bird flying down or flat,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to give it this idea of like soaring.\u2033<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word \u201cTwitter\u201d itself is playful, as is \u201ctweet.\u201d This was no accident, Bilton said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Other names that floated as the platform started out included \u201cStatus\u201d and \u201cFriend Stalker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was Noah Glass, another co-founder who never quite got the credit he deserved for his role in hatching Twitter, who had the winning idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Glass, Bilton said, \u201chad been thinking about like heartbeats and emotions. He was going through a divorce and he literally went through the dictionary word by word until he came across the word twitter. And he just knew instantly that was it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe was one of the four founders who had the emotional intelligence to be able to understand that this was about connecting with humans,\u201d Bilton said. \u201cIt was inviting, it was emotional. It was about connecting with humans and your friends and your loved ones.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Musk began his quest erasing Twitter\u2019s corporate culture and image in favor of his own vision as soon as he\u00a0took over the company\u00a0in October 2022. He lost three-quarters of the company\u2019s staff through firings, layoffs and voluntary departures, auctioned off furniture and d\u00e9cor, and upended policies on hate speech and misinformation. The rebranding to X was no surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter\u2019s rebranding is rooted in ambition that Musk began to pursue nearly a quarter century ago after he sold his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq Computer. He set out to create a one-stop digital shop for finance called X.com \u2014 an \u201ceverything\u201d service that would provide bank accounts, process payments, make loans and handle investments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He has not given up on the dream. Twitter is now X, falling in line with Musk\u2019s other X-named brands, SpaceX and Tesla\u2019s Model X. Not to mention his young son, whom he calls \u201cX.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His goal for X is to turn it into an \u201ceverything\u201d app \u2014 for video, photos, messaging, payments and other services, although he has given few details. For now, X.com is still, essentially Twitter.com, even as the blue bird and other playful tidbits start to disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere used to be a saying inside Twitter that Twitter was the company that couldn\u2019t kill itself. I think that still rings true, whether it\u2019s called Twitter or X,\u201d Bilton said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think that it\u2019s kind of become a fabric of society. And even Elon Musk may not be able to break it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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