At this past Friday’s Jelly session (wonderfully hosted by Kara by the way), some minor debate cropped up about Twitter. Specifically, there was some doubt cast on whether or not “twitter” was a real word, or else some nonsensical URL string of letters.

I quickly quelled the debate by calling up the Dictionary.com definition of “twitter”, specifically this one:

2. to talk lightly and rapidly, esp. of trivial matters; chatter.

Yes, the microblogging dynamic pretty much fits this summation. Although the site’s liberal use of the bird motif tells me that the Twitter bosses are hearkening to the association with “birds a’twittering” figurative description as well.

From this, we pondered that the word “twit” might be derived from the above. Whether it is or not, the increasingly frequent Twitter.com outages (which also came up among Twittering Jelly-ers on Friday) will probably prompt more than one invocation of that British-ish insult term toward the Head Twits in charge. Unless “Shitter” doesn’t take hold first.