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(letter, posing as noun) a frightful kind of online open-mic night, owned and dominated by Elon Musk
One of the (many) maddening things about it is that it’s not even an actual word. And yet on July 23 it was thrust upon us as one, when Elon Musk suddenly announced that the social media platform he had bought the previous year was now called X. A new black-and-white logo, designed by a fan, popped up in our bookmark bars and collective consciousness.
In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary broke with protocol when it added “tweet” to its hallowed pages, despite that use of the word having been around for less than 10 years. Yet in the space of a decade, a neologism has become a paleologism.
Twitter as we knew it is officially dead. And with it has gone not just the familiar bird logo, but also a whole lot of Twitter vocab: the tweet has become the much more generic “post”. Gone, too, are the retweet and quote-tweet. Analysts said Musk had wiped up to $20bn off the brand’s value overnight.
The social media platform is not the first of Musk’s babies to use the letter. He has used it as a name for various business ventures — most notably X.com, an online bank he co-founded in 1999 that later merged with another company to become PayPal — as well as for his first child with former girlfriend Grimes.
We might consider a homophone of the letter an apt description of what were once the platform’s biggest advertisers: ex. Corporate giants such as Apple, Disney and IBM all deserted it after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post last month. He later apologised and said he had been misinterpreted, though he also told the exes they could “go fuck” themselves.
So the platform flails on. With Musk at its helm, there’s no telling where it will be in a year’s time. The OED should probably hold off from adding the one-letter word to its pages for now.
jemima.kelly@ft.com