HASHTAG WHAT?

I have absolutely no use for "Twitter".  Putting every thought you want to communicate into 148 characters or less engenders shallowness and/or horrendous corruptions of the English language that - if experience is any guide - will insinuate themselves into common usage, even in formal settings.  

 

Take shortening "your" or "You are" into "UR".  If this is not brought to a screeching halt, someday you will recieve a traffic citation that says:"UR summoned 2 appear @ ..." 

 

One irksome thing about Twitter is this "hashtag" business. Boys and girls, THIS (#) IS CALLED A "POUND SIGN".  How did this become known as a "hashtag"?

 

Well, I have a theory. First, schools don't teach kids jack squat these days. So when people under a certain age saw a "pound sign" they puzzled at it and some called it "that cross-hatch thingie".  Then it became a "hatch-mark"

 

Then, lousy pronunciation skills mutated "hatch-mark" to "hash-mark".  Then along came Twitter, and since the pound sign was used to set a category (or something) it became a "hashtag".  Thus out of the swamp of ignorance did a new word ride the wave of modern scientific technology and arise to take its place in the majestic English language.

 

Oh, don't get me wrong; brevity has its place. The whole idea behind the Japanese poetic form known as "haiku" is to instill a profound thought into a very rigid framework of lines and syllables. (Any idiot can write something more or less coherent into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables; but to "attain haiku" involves much more than that).  And when sending encrypted messages, the shorter the message the less chance the code can be broken.

 

With that in mind, here is my view on Twitter, encrypted with a WWII German "Enigma" machine:

MKP

LPZ

CDJJS TYPUD RTMTE CTROY PLZJC

 

If any of you geniuses who love Twitter can decode that, send the translation in via comments and I'll publish it and credit the successful decryption to your name. (It's a single encrypt, not a double encryption; and it's in English. Words are set apart by "XX" in the plaintext).