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 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 jeeting. Geeding. Jeeting. Sure. No. Or jittering. Sounds wrong. And you know, the parent company at the time was called Odeo, and Twitter was an

offshoot of Odeo.

So it could be like Yodi Oling or something like that.

I don't know.

That's great.

Ode 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. You know, Frida Nancy, Nancy Friedman. And she's got great stuff on there all the time about brand names and how products get their names. So we'll link to that from our website. And the best stuff that she does is when she finds these terrible names of products and reports them and talks about how bad they are. Everybody likes a bad review more than good review, right? Fun for the whole family. 877-929-9673. Words at Wayward Radio.org.

Hello, you have a way with words.

Hi.

This is Lindsay from New York, and I had a question for you guys.

Hi, Lindsay, welcome.

What is it?

Last week, I was hanging out with some friends,

and I said that I had gotten a wild hair and decided to do something.

Mm-hmm. And everyone I was with kind of looked at me like I said that I had gotten a wild hair and decided to do something.

And everyone I was with kind of looked at me like I had three heads all of a sudden.

And, you know, it came out that they actually had no idea what I was talking about.

Now, I'm from the South, and I was hanging out with people that are – one was Southern, and one was from New York originally.

So it's a wide group of people, but nobody had heard of this before.

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