Spaced out: a rant.

I rather like Twitter, but then my feed is full of poetry and images of ducks, dresses, and works of art rather than shengmus, spite, and self-advertisement.

I just wish my Facebook page was the same.

Even so, Twitter is a very new way of using words, and an amusing pitfall with the medium appeared recently.

Mr Rudy Giuliani, an American lawyer and politician, posted this message (look at the colours of the text):





The political implications of the Tweet don't matter for our current purposes (except to note the amazing amount of indignation it's possible to get into a single Tweet) but do you see the bit of text that's come out in blue? This is the result of a feature on Twitter which forms an automatic link to another web page if you type in that page's URL address.

It's jolly useful.

But you see what's happened here? Mt Giuliani has neglected to type a space. That's all he's done (twice, but the second time doesn't matter). He meant to type the harmless words for G-20. In July, but he's missed out the space after the full stop. And to the Twitter system G-20.In looks like the address of a web page in India.

Most entertainingly, once the Arizona-based website designer Jason Velazquez had spotted Mr Giuliani's error, it soon was the address of a web page in India.

The webpage G-20.In apparently has a message on it very annoying to Mr Giuliani, and so far it's been seen by over 16,000 people.

And so now poor Mr Giuliani is now even more full of indignation than he was to start with. 

But as for the rest of us...

...well, you really have to laugh, don't you?

Word To Use Today: indignation. This word has been around in English since about 1325. The Middle English form was indignacion, which is almost the same as nowadays, as is the Latin form, indignāri, to be indignant.

Which just goes to prove that there's always something, doesn't it.