Ian On The Red Dot

I was trying to fit a message into the 140 characters limit when I realized that while some academics and intellectual snobs have bemoaned the quality of English used on services like Twitter and the bastardization of the language, I realized that Twitter can actually help us improve our English.

Remember all those summaries you had to do in Secondary School? Well, Twittering with proper English words forces you to learn how to say what you need to, or want to, as succinctly as possible. You might be compelled to improve your vocabulary by learning synonyms and antonyms.

Of course we can just continue to use lol, wtf, rofl, omg or just make up new ones. However, I think the use of such services, while condescendingly referred to as symptomatic of our snacking culture, might help us if we allow it to.

Any teacher planning to create a course syllabus around the use of Twitter as a tool to teach English? Imagine a game being played with Twitter where players actually improve their English at the end of the day.

Hmmm…

I just managed to get TwitterBerry working on my BlackBerry.  It seems that I needed M1 to push Service Books to me so that the external applications I installed onto the BlackBerry would start working.  I’ve been trying to get the external applications to work for some time to no avail.  Today, I decided to call M1 customer service for the second time to check for me and the lady who was helping me realized what was wrong and pushed the needed Service Books.

Here is the thing.  It was my second time calling.  The first time was a few months ago and I got this guy who was supposed to help me but all he did was insist that things should be working.  I told him my problem.  I think I even asked about Service Books.  He said something along these lines, ‘Should work what, I mean, I tried before and it works, so it should work on your BlackBerry.  You just try k, should work.’  Thanks a lot Sherlock.

I feel the collective pride of all mandom talking a hit here.  I mean, a lady provided better technical support than a guy.  I know it’s a sexist thing to say, but if there was one thing, just one thing left in this world where a guy could be better at something, I had hope it would be knowing more about tech stuff.

Sigh.  Now even that has been taken away from us.

What is there left for us to cling on to for some flimsy vestige of superiority?

Anyway, now that I have TwitterBerry, I’m going to start twittering more especially when I’m commuting.  Got to make sure the unlimited data plan does not go to waste.  Hopefully, there will be tweets by twistedian worth reading.