I think I became aware of the word trending a few years ago, whenever it began to creep outside of Twitter, as I’ve only recently started to dip my toes in the water of the Twittersphere. My first thought was that the word seemed to mean popular, but that there must be some more specific meaning to it. In time, I told myself, that meaning would become clear.
I’ve been nominated for this award by Grace over at That Feeling Inside. A big thank you to her, and I recommend her blog for her thoughts on beauty, movies, and everything else.
This award was created by Okoto Enigma to bring bloggers together. And it’s a nice change of pace and short post on a Sunday when I don’t want to write too much.
Happy Birthday Hashtag.
The symbol’s now been in use for ten years on Twitter. It’s changed the way we communicate online a lot, allowing us to condense complex messages into simple phrases, and has now spread beyond Twitter. It only took me about nine of those ten years to figure out how to use them. And even now I’m not entirely convinced I’m doing it right.
While writing about social media yesterday, a thought occurred: what’s the etymology of the name Instagram? The Insta- part seemed pretty obvious, but I was curious about the –gram part. Luckily, when you want to find out about the etymology of the names of social media, you don’t have to do too much digging…
We’d sit here and make up great tall tales. – Bobby Briggs
An exaggerated anecdote, or even an outright lie, can be called a tall tale. Where does this phrase come from?
I had a strange experience recently on, I believe, Facebook. It might have been Twitter, but I think it was Facebook. Having a cursory pass through my newsfeed, something caught my eye. It was a headline for a fairly typical slightly clickbaity article. It featured a young woman, presumably a model or actress, standing next to a billboard on which she featured. The headline was a quote from her, something like this:
How about a short light post today, after getting heavy yesterday (I mean, Nazis, after all)? A few weeks ago, I wrote about a typical example of how ideas come to me, and make their way onto your screen. Usually ideas come to me like that, just based on my everyday encounters with language. When I start a post with something like The other day I was listening to the radio and I noticed how the presenter pronounced the word haberdashery, it’s usually true, and not some awkward way to introduce the topic. And sometimes I’ll start with something like The other day I was wondering about the etymology of the word hamster… because that’s the kind of thing I do when my mind has a moment to wander.
English-Language Thoughts 