Meaning of Twitterese | Babel Free

Definitions

The type of language used on Twitter.

uncountable

Examples

“To learn Twitterese, review the tweets of other users to see how they’re condensing messages. Just remember to turn off Twitterese when you send an email to someone or compose a letter.”

“Responding to a woman I’ve never met who works in book publishing, I type in the language of 140-character Twitterese: “I want Mr. T GPS voice! How abt James Earl Jones? He says turn left you *turn* left. Or Norah Jones? Plaintive directions.””

“The role of celebrity is to anchor a group (known in Twitterese as ‘followers’) into present-tense meaningfulness or future-facing conditions, which may be why newly minted celebrities are ever younger in the most prominent international popular-culture systems (Hollywood; music; social media).”

“We might say that moving through all three languages from Shakespeare to Twitterese involves imaginatively going beyond the givens, creating a startling and novel declaration: “horses go all cannibal . . .””

“Based on the internet linguistics research (cf. Crystal 2006, 2008), we propose a unitary analysis of “paralinguistic devices” such as hashtags and punctuation devices found in Twitterese which ascribe “tonal colouring” to utterances, serving to express humour, sarcasm, irony, and self-deprecation.”

“On second look, the mainstream media resisted reporting the Anti-Theory story (~atoe in Twitterese) because it seemed so catastrophic.”

CEFR level