Have your hash and tweet it
THERE’S been a lot of flutter lately about people leaving Twitter. “Twitter quitters”, some call them. There’s Stephen Fry, who left because of too much adoration but is now back again; Miley Cyrus, who left because of too much ridicule but might return when she has a new dance move; and that woman who boasted about shooting a lion and a clutch of crocodiles, who should stay away.
All these departures are understandable. The question is not why people fly the coop, but why they nest there at all. I cannot fathom why someone who has fastidiously avoided the social-media machine for years would suddenly succumb. Maybe it’s because all the others are leaving. Maybe it’s a cowboyish addiction to trend-bucking. I don’t know.
But there it is. The address is at the top of the page, so make sure you tweet me wight. One of the unhealthy side-effects of Twitter is that for some reason it makes one lisp. Are there sugar-fwee tweets for diabetics, I wonder?
In some things, such as the hokey symbolism of its egg-in-a-forest default photograph (baby bird about to hatch and start tweeting, get it?), Twitter has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in fishnet stockings. Although I suppose a sledgehammer would only wear one fishnet stocking, on its handle.
Most tweets are not read, they say, probably because they are not interesting. You’re probably wondering how someone as well behaved as you has managed to get yourself into the career front line. No matter. However hard you’ve been trying to hide your leadership qualities, they will shine through. Watch the ego. There’s more back-room work to come, the kind that happens just before your glory moment comes. But some aspects of the twittering class are fascinating. Take the hashtag. This compound sledgehammer word was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary last year. Hashtag has nothing to do with the quality or price of tender hemp leaves. A hashtag in front of a word indicates an imaginary place where strangers debate the qualities of, for instance, hedgehogs.
The origins of hash are more interesting, as a narcotics officer might say. Apart from being short for hashish, the word “hash” (from French hacher, “to chop up”) can be applied to potatoes, a stew, a mess or the paper field on which one plays noughts and crosses.
No one is quite sure who invented noughts and crosses (curse their chalk and slate forever), but the name for the cross-hatched sign on computer keyboards is presumed to come from American slang for the stripes on the sleeve of a military uniform. Maybe it should have been called the rank key.
In Britain, what is now known as the hash sign was originally called the “pound sign”, as in the measurement of weight — abbreviated as “lb” and sometimes written with a cross through the top. That got confusing, as you might imagine, so the Brits began following the American convention of calling # the “number sign”. Until Twitter made a hash of things, #1 was read out as “number one”. Now you’d say “hash one”, which sounds like a knitting pattern.
In the 1960s, a scientist at Bell laboratories in the US modified the telephone keypad and added the hash key as a means of delivering operating instructions to the system. He gave # the name “octothorpe” — “octo” because it had eight ends and “Thorpe” because … no one knows. Apparently it was not his name. It didn’t stick. Octothorpe used too many characters, so back we went to hash.
How we got from hashish to a messy stew to soldiers’ stripes to octothorpes and back to hash is part of the splendid absurdity of language. Twitter, like hedgehogs, lends itself to absurdity and brevity. There’s a lot to be said for brevity. It is possible to say something, absurd or not, in 140 characters without spelling errors. Look, I just did it in 90.