Comments on: Oh, the irony: 'Twitter' used to be whaling slang

Long before Twitter was using the "fail whale" as its server-outage image, the word "twitter" was an obscure anatomical term specific to the long-since-taboo practice of hunting sperm whales.

[Thad Boyd]

In what way is that ironic, exactly?

That's not irony.

[byrneseyeview]

Because of the "fail whale". Whales are central to Twitter culture; the word "twitter" comes from whaling culture.

Incidentally, it would take 8981 tweets to retweet Moby Dick, or more if you took breaks for spaces. If Melville didn't have unlimited texting, it's pretty obvious why he died broke.

[gregmar]

Odd maybe, irony - no. Less obscure twitter is "the sounds made by certain birds." http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/twitter

That could be irony.

[Demersal]

I think it's likely that electronic twittering was deliberately named after the sounds of small songbirds i.e. ubiquitous, random, and meaningless or ridiculous to others. But oh so important to the sender!

[CraigeMoore]

Caroline, am I missing where you have a link on this article to follow you on Twitter? It's got to be here somewhere! On a story about Twitter! ... Right?

[caroline.mccarthy]

You can follow me at twitter.com/caro :)

[therecanbeonlyonechuckles]

Merri-Webster defines irony as (summarizing): 1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning, 2 the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning, or 3 incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.

You can consider this to be ironic according to the 3rd definition.

[mikeburek]

Glad that whale is still Twittering.

[EcoSurfer]

Maybe the "Irony" would be that the word "Twitter" that came from a whaling term in 1902 and is now used in 2009 to describe a social network .......could also take it's place in the dictionary as a "word" that described how a social network "Twitter" led to the end of commercial whaling once and for all.

"Twitter"...1.a social network that was instrumental in ending commercial whaling 2. a movement

[JBSheppard]

No matter how you slice it, Twitter was a poor choice of name for a supposed "co-ed" social networking site since society defines Twitter as birds chirping. I don't personally know of any male that wants to be viewed as: chirping like a bird....

[Xade_not_perfect]

I do not...twitter! The name of it is what make me not want to use the service, twitter = twittering birds. That, plus the incredible amount of inane babble.