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You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it. I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett. Grant, you and I often invite folks to contact

our show on Twitter, right? But if it hadn't been for a twist of lexical fate, we'd be inviting them to contact us on jitter. On jitter. On jitter. Because that's what the service was going to be called, either jitter or Twitch. And co-founder Jack Dorsey has said that they were looking for a name that evoked what the service did. And of course, in the early days,

they would get a text message and every day... Twitch. And co-founder Jack Dorsey has said that they were looking for a name that evoked what the

service did.

And, of course, in the early days, they would get a text message.

And every time that would happen, their phone would buzz or jitter or Twitch.

Yeah, they do that table dance, right?

The phone kind of just bounces all over the table.

Exactly.

So they started nosing around in the dictionary looking for a word that was close to Twitch.

And they came across Twitter, and, of course, that perfectly encapsulated what they were doing, sending out those short bursts of information. So if that product name hadn't gone through an evolution, we would all be jeeding. Jeeting. Jeeting. Sure. No. Or jittering. It sounds wrong. And, you know, the parent company at the time was called Odeo, and Twitter was an

offshoot of Odeo, because so it could be like Yodi Oling or something like that. I don't know.

That's great.

Odi Oli. Boy, I'm glad they chose Twitter. But, you know, a great place to find out about

product names is the blog by our friend Nancy Friedman.

It's called Frida Nancy, which is a great name in itself because it comes from an old word that means chirping or creaking.

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