Blog June 2008

If you love Twitter, you’ll likely hate it in equal proportion for its constant propensity for crashing. Users of live blogging or chat platform - even Twitter itself - can easily find themselves discussing the question “is Twitter down?”

This has brought about the inception of a website that solves this, and only this question. istwitterdown.com consists solely of a white page with one word, in black at the centre of the page, saying either “yes” or “no”. No adverts, no titles, no explanation, nothing except that single word, which is linked in the case that Twitter is up to the Kool and the Gang single Celebration. (Because Twitter was up when I checked the site - shock horror - I’m not aware of what the link URL would be if the site fails.)

Reminds me of the original “Last page of the Internet”, of which there are now several, ad-plastered versions.

Many of us - especially those who work in the wishy-washy world of social media - use words which are cobbled together from others and which we have either ourselves made up or are dreamed up by our peers and contemporaries.

I’m often surprised at what words don’t make it in to common spell checkers: words like blogging, podcasting and even the universally accepted online (as apposed to the original hyphenated version). When I use a new piece of software that comes bundled with its own spell checker, I don’t get very far before I’m adding lots of words into the software’s dictionary (even after changing the language from American to English and replacing all the auto-corrected Zs with Ss).

I’m finding recently that I let a lot more words slip through the net when faced with the choice to add or ignore an ostensive misspelling, so words like Stef’s gobbledygeek or Stephen Fry’s blessay are being added and accepted into my own personal lexicon.

You can have a lot of fun reading through the words that you add to your phone’s predictive text dictionary. Most of them are profane but it gives you an interesting insight into the less common words people find useful.

Is the Internet a haven for these new bastardised words, or does the inherent textual nature of the Web and its ever-increasing meme culture make the words more viraflexispreadable?

What words are in your personal dictionary?

(Words that didn’t pass WordPress’ spell checker - which incidentally does not include an expandable dictionary: wishy, podcasting, ostensive [a real word], gobbledygeek, blessay and [unsurprisingly] viraflexispreadable)