Elon Musk Proposes Transforming Tweets into ‘X’s’, But Language Conversion is Complex

For now, the term “tweet” is likely to remain in use, despite Elon Musk’s desire to move away from it and his new platform being called X.

First, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter. Write a message, you still have to press the blue button that says “tweet” to post it. You can retweet it by tapping “retweet”.

But it’s more than that.

Twitter achieved with “tweets” in just a few years what few companies have done in their lifetime: It became a verb and entered the American and world lexicon. It takes more than a top-down announcement, even if it’s from the owner of Twitter-X, who also happens to be one of the richest men in the world.

“Language has always come from people who use it every day. And you can’t control it, you can’t create it, you can’t change it. You don’t get to decide that,” said Nick Bilton, author of “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal,” about Twitter’s origins.

Twitter didn’t start out as Twitter. It was “twttr” – without the vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and texting was very popular. The iPhone was only released in 2007.

Twitter founder Evan Williams “went one day and bought vowels, two vowels essentially for $7,500 each,” when he bought the twitter.com URL from a birder, Bilton said.

In the beginning, people weren’t “tweeting” — it was, “I’m going to tweet this,” Bilton recalled. But “twittered” doesn’t roll off the tongue and “tweet” soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then in San Francisco, then everywhere.

We’ve been tweeting for well over a decade. World leaders, celebrities and athletes, dissidents of oppressive regimes, propaganda trolls. sex workers and religious icons, meme queens and real queens. Former President Donald Trump’s rampant use of the bird app quickly catapulted the “tweet” into near-constant headlines during his presidency. People who never signed up for Twitter knew what the word meant.

For now, we tweet, retweet, quote tweets, and sometimes—perhaps not often enough—delete tweets. News sites embed tweets in their stories and TV shows roll them. No other social network has a word for posting that has become vernacular like “tweet” — although Google did the same with “googling.”

The Oxford English Dictionary added “tweet” in 2011. Merriam-Webster followed in 2013. The Associated Press Stylebook followed suit in 2010.

“Getting into the dictionary is an indication that people are already using it,” said Jack Lynch, a Rutgers University English professor who studies the history of the language. “Dictionaries tend to be quite circumspect or cautious about letting in new words, especially for new phenomena, because they don’t want things to be just flashbacks.”

As Twitter grew into a global messaging platform and struggled with misinformation, trolls and hate speech, its friendly brand image remained. The blue bird icon evokes a smile, like Amazon’s upturned arrow smile—as opposed to Musk’s prescribed X.

Martin Grasser was two years out of art school when Twitter hired him to redesign the logo in 2011. His logo wasn’t Twitter’s first bird logo, but it would be the most enduring.

“They knew they wanted the bird. So we didn’t start completely from scratch, but they wanted it to be on the level of Apple and Nike. It was really short,” he said.

Twitter launched Grasser’s design in May 2012; the company went public on Wall Street later that year.

An early in-house design shown to Grasser looked “like a flying goose tail. It looked a little bit like a dragon. It was crazy,” he said. Jack Dorsey, co-founder (and twice CEO) wanted something simpler.

The bird represented a vision of Twitter as a friendly place “where everyone can weigh in and have a conversation,” Grasser said.

“The round shape creates a sense of optimism, the bird is even sort of turned up, as corny as it sounds, I think it’s different from a bird flying down or flat,” he said. “We wanted to give it this feeling of flying.”

The word “Twitter” itself is playful, as is “tweet.” This was no accident, Bilton said.

Other names floating around when the platform launched included “Status” and “Friend Stalker”.

The winning idea was Noah Glass, the co-founder who never got the credit he deserved for his role in creating Twitter.

Glass, Bilton said, “had thought like heartbeats and emotions. He was going through a divorce and he was literally going through the dictionary word for word until he came across the word twitter. And he just knew right away that was it.”

“He was one of the four founders who had the emotional intelligence to understand that this was about connecting with people,” Bilton said. “It was inviting, it was emotional. It was about connecting with people, your friends and loved ones.”

Musk began his quest to erase Twitter’s corporate culture and image in favor of his own vision as soon as he took over the company in October 2022. He lost three-quarters of the company’s staff through layoffs, layoffs, at-will sources, and auctioned off furniture and decor. , and policies regarding hate speech and misinformation. Changing the brand to X was not a surprise.

Twitter’s rebranding stems from an ambition Musk began pursuing nearly a quarter-century ago after selling his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq Computer. He decided to create a one-stop shop for digital finance called X.com – an “everything” service that would offer bank accounts, process payments, lend and manage investments.

He hasn’t given up on the dream. Twitter is now X, aligning itself with Musk’s other X-branded brands, SpaceX and Tesla’s Model X. Not to mention his young son whom he calls “X”.

His goal for X is to make it an “everything” app for videos, photos, messages, payments and other services, though he’s given few details. For now, X.com is still mostly Twitter.com, although the blue bird and other playful stuff is starting to disappear.

“There was a saying at Twitter back in the day that Twitter was a company that couldn’t kill itself. I think that’s still true, whether it’s Twitter or X,” Bilton said.

“I think it has become a kind of fabric of society. And even Elon Musk might not be able to break it.”