SNP’s word of the day: Twitterology

Word: Twitterology

Meaning: The study of tweets, or more academically, “real-time language data.”

Usage: “In this burgeoning field of Twitterology, moods are also being gauged on a more global level.” — Ben Zimmer in yesterday’s New York Times

You should know it because: Ben Zimmer is the exec producer of visualthesaurus.com and vocabulary.com, so if he says Twitterology’s a word, it’s a word. Whether it’s a science is less clear. Sociologists and linguists have studied Twitter patterns to chart the increase of positive and religious sentiment after Gaddafi‘s death and to observe daily mood changes in English-speaking countries (shocking news: if you’re reading this later in your workday, you feel worse). And a team of computational linguists (they sound very cunning indeed) has used geocoded tweets to map out language and slang use by region across America. This is how I learned that people in California say “koo” instead of cool, a development I can only blame on the Kardashians. Anyway… koo study.

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