PSA About Twitter

I asked a friend the other day -- "What exactly is twitter?"  I know.  Shouldn't I know that by now?   It's gotten way too late to ask about it.

Like, "Um, could someone fill me in -- what's the internet again?  Oh, that's right!  I totally knew that.  I just forgot for a second.  No, seriously!  I did so know what the internet is!  My mom even took us there on vacation once back before it got popular with the tourists.  In fact, I knew about the internet before they even had the net part, you were just out there loose."

Things I already knew about Twitter:

• There's a 140 character limit, which seems both cool and confining.  In fact, I sometimes wish we had that in conversations.  As in, "Ooops!  You're all out of characters. No more route talk for you!"
• You follow people but it's not considered creepy
• When you follow someone it seems like they're following you, because the follow-ees deliver themselves up to the follow-ers at random times.  (Who's stalking who?)
•  Umm.  I guess that's it.  I had hoped this would be a longer list.

Things I didn't know: 

•  If you follow someone, and they tweet, how does it arrive?  As a singing telegram? A knock at the door?  (Or, if you have one, a ring of the doorbell? Do people still have doorbells?  Oh wait, is that just me again, with no doorbell?)  E-mail?  Text?  It couldn't be any of those, I thought (not for the obvious reason, which is that it would be weird if when I'm stalking someone, they knock at my door and sing out their 140 character message.  No, that's not why it couldn't be one of those.  It's because there's a whole new verb, "twitter".  (That name itself is where I started to picture the handsome shirtless guy dropping by with the messages.)  If there's a new verb, there must be a new actual thing, right?
• Why?   (On all of it.  140 characters, the confusing relationship between the follower and the followee, the name, etc.)

What I learned:

You download an ap and the tweets arrive on your phone as words on the screen.  Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar.  Have you guys heard of "texting"?  Yeah, completely different.  Requires a brand new verb.  We know the word "running."  But we'd need a whole different word for running in seersucker pants with scissors, of course.  Don't try that (seersucker at this time of year).  It's bad manners.

 We're going to run out of verbs at this rate, people.  We'll come to a point, the planet's getting warmer, we're getting older, the turkey leftovers need to be tossed, the dark times are upon us, and suddenly, when we least expect it, something brand new, a brand new way of locomotion will arise, and there won't be any words left.  We'll go to the verb cupboard, totally empty.