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Language police and Twitter's 140 words

I was really struggling to put my thoughts into a Tweet and as I kept misspelling words so that they would fit I was fervently hoping my daughter wouldn't read this post.If she did my authority to tell her to dot her "i"s and cross her "t"s would just disappear :). Then I had horrible thoughts of the punishment the "Language" Police would inflict on me. Of course the consoling thought was that if I created a new word it may find itself in the Washington Post like w00t did I braved myself and asked this question on Twitter.

Do you think the language police will be after me because I have to have typos to make the message fit the 140 character Twitter limit?

And here is the support I got:

hoovers @shashib, the language police will have to read you your Miranda rights in 140 characters or less
mariana_66 @shashib: i'm always spelling creatively on twitter & txt - i have a lot to say & have trouble fitting it into 140 chars! It's good practice
conniereece @shashib As a member in good standing of the Grammar Police, I can assure you we make exceptions for the 140-char. limit of Twitter. :)
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Anonymous said…
Hey..if you actually want to bypass the 140 character limit on Twitter(just so that you don't have to write the SMS lingo!), we just made a firefox extension which does exactly that. Do check out - http://shortText.com/twitzer.aspx

You don't need to worry about the length at all, no need to shorten URLs. This extension will take care of the whole post.

Do send us your comments. Hope you like it!

Cheers,
Mike
March 22, 2008 at 3:12 AM
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