LEITURA: Are you a tweeter?

Are you a tweeter? If so, you're now one of close on 100 million people around the world. The 'Twitter' phenomenon, which started in California in 2006, has in four short years thoroughly embedded itself in humanity's communication systems.

         In case you're one of the few people who have never heard if it, it's an Internet social networking site which enables users to communicate with others by means of text-based messages of up to 140 characters. Its founder, Jack Dorsey, wanted a name for it that suggested the trembling vibrations of a ringing phone, and he came up with 'Twitter'.

         The main meaning of that word is, of course, 'the small quiet repeated sounds made by birds', and when people wanted to refer to an individual Twitter message, there was another very similar English word of nearly identical meaning ready and waiting: 'tweet'.

Tweets are like online text messages

         This first appeared as a noun in 2007, and the verb soon followed, meaning 'to send a Twitter message' (as in 'Hundreds of people tweeted her after her article appeared in the newspaper'). If you're a keen tweeter, then you're a member of the 'Twitterati' (a coinage based on 'literati', a collective name for well-read intellectuals, and probably also on 'glitterati', meaning 'all the glamorous people').

         Not quite such a successful product of all this verbal invention, though, is 'Twitpic', the name of a website that enables you to send pictures via Twitter, which, for British speakers at least, calls to mind 'twit', meaning 'a silly person'.

                        Answer :

1)      How many people around the world are familiar with this kind of communicaton?

2)      Where did it all break out?

3)      What are users able to do with this social networking?

4)      Is this name an onomatopoeia?

Find the opposite:

1)      ENDED

2)      PERSON

3)      LATER

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