bigideas

As some of you may know, BigIdeas has recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Since Twitter seems to be reaching a Facebook-in-2007-like critical mass, all kinds of widgets have been added to it to make it more useful. Unlike Facebook, none of these seems to be about werewolves or fish, which is a Good Thing.

These new things are mostly made by companies that want to make money out of next big thing, so they’re branded and given cute names in keeping with the generally cute nature of twitter itself. The most nauseating I’m aware of are the groups one can join to find like-minded Twitter users; these are called Twibes. But the one that struck me yesterday was TweetShrink.

I found TweetShrink while looking at the buttons I don’t usually use on TweetDeck (you can also use it on their web site). Because Twitter limits you to 140 characters per post, you can sometimes find it hard to say what you want to. OK, it’s not a blog and if you want to write something like this, you don’t tweet it. But sometimes you type what you want to say and it’s, say, 160 characters. Finding 20 characters to trim can be tiresome. TweetShrink uses a collection of simple usage-based rules to suggest shortenings of words in your tweet in an effort to help you bring it under the limit. Some are derived from SMS txting (“2″ for “to”, “u” for “you”, “ur” for “your” etc) and some are a lot older (“w/” instead of “with” for example).

So that’s TweetShrink. I tried it yesterday on a tweet to see what it did and it reported:

TweetShrinked by 10

meaning it had reduced my tweet’s length by ten characters. Feeling a little snarky, I tweeted to nobody in particular:

Seems the past participle of the verb to TweetShrink is TweetShrinked, not TweetShrunk. I’m no prescriptivist but that makes me a little sad

Somewhat to my surprise, within a few minutes I had a reply from the user @tweetshrink saying

@bigideas haha… no, it’s just “shrinked”. were it “shrunk” you wouldn’t be able to tell if we did it or someone else.

Here’s where I did a double take. This was a grammar decision taken not out of any notion of correctness or common usage, but as an exercise in brand formation. “TweetShrinked” means “shrunk using TweetShrink” whereas, if I understand the reply correctly, the alternative might be interpreted without the camel case as

Tweet shrunk by 10

which might equally be the message returned by some competing product.

As I said in the original tweet, I’m not a prescripitivist and I’m not being snarky about “TweetShrinked”. In fact, if you’ll excuse me going all Language Log for a moment, “shrinked” gets 148,000 Google hits to “shrunk”s 5,370,000, suggesting “shrinked” is a minority but by no means unattested usage. And I knew perfectly well what was meant. The point is that TweetShrinked seems marked to me compared with TweetShrunk, and I think Google bears me out to some extent on that.

I think the reasoning behind this is that “TweetShrinked” contains the whole word “TweetShrink”, and is therefore closer to the TweetShrink brand. If (and I don’t know whether this is true) more of our neologisms come from brand names these days, perhaps we can expect to see more declensions being determined by marketing departments rather than the language community as a whole. It’s just a thought.