Other Twitters and the OED
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
Apart from the even more distant twitters of certain insects and birds, I was introduced some forty years ago to a variant of the newly popular word in the form of Paul Klee’s 1922 painting Twittering Machine (in German Die Zwitschermaschine, in French La Machine a gazouiller). Is it merely whimsy or does it echo the horrors of the First World War? In any case, Klee remains one of my favorite artists. And I first observed this image (if memory serves)in the article on painting in World Book Encyclopedia. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I know what I was glad I found. Encyclopedias and other reference books are a wonderful place to browse and discover. I invite you to Google this image because not only will you see Klee’s creation but also many interesting painted and sculpted variants. There is even a pop band called Twittering Machine.
All of this thinking about twitter naturally led me to the Oxford English Dictionary, which devotes nearly a page of small print to the term and its variants. My library’s print edition does not take things up to the present. There are seven bold-faced main entries for twitter alone, to say nothing of its many variants. Several of the many definitions resonate, for me, with Twitter, the communications phenomenon of the day.
First, “A condition of twittering or tremulous excitement (from eager desire, fear, etc.)…”
Second, “A shred, a fragment.”
Third, “An entanglement; a complication.”
Chaucer, circa 1374, provides the OED’s earliest citation: “The Iangelynge bryd .. enclosed in a streyht cage .. twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.” It reminds me of one of the most amazing feats I ever saw: a caged bird outside a hutong in Beijing repeatedly doing backflips and landing on its perch. But I don’t think that’s what Chaucer had in mind.
