What a tweet

Twitter, the microblogging service which allows you to send pithy messages to tell friends what you are having for dinner or that you're picking your nose or something equally memorable, is being used by the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's camp to alert his supporters to rallies.

That Obama should be an early adopter is not perhaps unexpected. He's no fool nor apparently a twit because the verb for broadcasting such messages via Twitter is not twittering but "tweeting" according to The Economist (Feb 2). How sweet.

To tweet someone to a blow-by-blow account of your daily life is not the only quirky term to catch my eye. Lexicographers are having a field day thanks to bizarre and often unrepeated words coined on the internet. The suffix "-licious" is particularly popular according to an article about language distortion in cyberspace in New Scientist (Feb 2). For more examples, check out the blog Wordlustitude or the Urban Dictionary.

My favourite tongue-twister is "henchgoon" defined as "an alternate term for administrative assistant or minion of doom". How could a lowly soul who files paper and a harbinger of despair be conflated? People can be so cruel.