Denník N

Ladies and gentlemen, začvirikajme si!

James Thurber (1894 – 1961), Google & Twitter. Zdroj – Wikimedia & pixabay/Mizter_x94 & pixabay/redymzoy0
James Thurber (1894 – 1961), Google & Twitter. Zdroj – Wikimedia & pixabay/Mizter_x94 & pixabay/redymzoy0

Naozaj sa v slovenčine nedá vyhnúť slovesu tweetovať a podstatnému menu tweet – v ére, keď sa na čvirikavej platforme ohlasujú najzávažnejšie rozhodnutia v politickom živote?

OK, I might ignore one such coincidence, but two of them… gotta share. In James Thurber’s stories collection from 1937, Let Your Mind Alone! (as selectively reprinted in Library of America), in the short story »A Couple of Hamburgers«, a leading male character is singing a tune about Barney Google (!). A couple of stories later, in »Mrs. Phelps«, two ladies are in “twittery (!) fright”.

The comic-strip character of Barney Google inspired the naming of the mathematical term googol, via the mathematician’s 9-year-old nephew, which in turn inspired the naming of the search engine that, however, reverted to the original character’s name: Google. That by itself was, naturally, derived from the ancient verb goggle = “stare with wide eyes”.

Twittery was a fairly new adjective in Thurber’s time, apparently first recorded in the 1880s. Twitter as a verb is ancient, though, going back centuries to Middle English and being of imitative origin. Now tweet as a noun is much younger, being “only” 250 years old or so.

I suppose there is zero chance we can, in Slovak, avoid the Anglicisms of tvítovať and tvít (yes, spelled like that – it’s only a question of time) by replacing them with similarly poetic Slovak counterparts such as čvirikať, čvirik, right?

Teraz najčítanejšie

Alexander Avenarius

Prekladateľ, korektor, tlmočník, učiteľ jazykov, správca serverov. Milovník elektronickej literatúry a mobilných prístrojov (čiže digitálny knihomoľ), študent filozofie a filmov, polyglot, grafoman, hobby-recenzent. Tvorca alternatívneho rozloženia slovenskej klávesnice. Môj alternatívny blog je na adrese extempore.top. Svoje knižné, filmové a iné recenzie posielam – vzhľadom na prehlbujúcu sa nefunkčnosť portálov IMDb a Amazon – aj do blogu AveKritik.com.