Have you noticed a recent proliferation of tw- words in the language?
Miley Cyrus’s twerking exhibition on an awards show set off a storm of criticism among the people-watchers of the world. I, for one, had never heard about twerking before that episode, but I confess to be somewhat oblivious to the latest lingo, one of the more obvious ramifications of retiring from a profession that kept me in close contact with kids and their proclivities for slang.
I am also a little out of the social media loop; I don’t tweet. I don’t have a Twitter account, I don’t “follow” anyone, and I don’t do “hash-tags,” whatever they are. But tweeting seems to have become an important part of our times. Even the pope tweets. So do diplomats and politicians, football stars and Prince Harry. And I see hash-tag symbols everywhere. Maybe it’s time for me to become more aware.
Since I’ve started this epistle with tweeting and twerking, I thought it might be interesting to pay attention to some of the “tw-” words in our language. (Incidentally, I read that twerk was the top “teleword” of 2013. And the year wasn’t even over!) So let’s start with twerking.
Wikipedia says that “twerking is a type of dancing in which the dancer, usually a woman, shakes her hips in an up-and-down bouncing motion, causing the dancer’s butt to shake, wobble and bounce.” According to Oxford Dictionaries, to twerk is “to dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance.”
The word twerking is of uncertain origin. Possibilities include a contraction of “footwork” or a portmanteau of twist and jerk.
Since I didn’t know for sure, I went to the Internet and asked “What Exactly Is ‘Twitter’? What Is ‘Tweeting’?” What I found out is this: Twitter is microblogging. Does that help you? Twitter and tweeting are about broadcasting daily, short, burst messages called tweets (140 characters max) to the world at large (not to any specific person), with the hope that your messages are useful and interesting to someone, anyone.
Twitter is also about discovering interesting people online and following their burst messages for as long as they are interesting. I read that some people tweet over 100 times a day! And people brag about how many followers they have.
So why is it so popular? Why do millions of people follow other tweeters? Well, for one thing, it’s relatively novel yet, and I’m told it’s a very fast and friendly way to track hundreds of interesting tweeters. You can be in constant touch with what Aaron Rodgers is tweeting, for example.
I don’t know enough about Twitter to go any farther, so let me digress and get back to my original thought about looking at some tw- words. So, we’ve sort of covered tweeting and twerking; how about twist and twitch? The twist was a popular dance 40 years ago, and Stephen Boss (professional name “tWitch”) is a popular rap dancer.
Twist and twirl (probably a blend of twist and whirl?), tweak and twiddle are other tw- words.
The word “two” begins with tw even though we don’t pronounce it as such, but it has a lot of derivatives such as twelve, twenty, twin, twilight, twine, twice, twain. Twig and twit are fairly common. So is tweezers.
Twill and tweed, both types of fabric, don’t seem to have any connection with the others here. Neither do twang, twinkle and twerp.
So if Tweedledee and Tweedledum, not very bright characters, had smart phones and could twiddle their thumbs, perhaps they could tweet, and maybe they could help me tweak this piece and figure out a way to end it. It’s just a lot of twaddle, anyway, right?
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