I don’t use Twitter. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say, X. Or should I have said “I don’t use X, formerly known as Twitter.” This is the clunky phrase that has pervaded our current discourse. When can we just say, “X?” Twitter was always too bird-oriented. Chickadees tweet, people drone on and on.
So how about now? Can we update it now? Soon, soon. There are strong precedents for abandoning the “formerly” trap.
At some point, people stopped saying, “I was vacationing in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon,” figuring you’d be able to find the island on a map.
When your dumbest, least ambitious friend comes back from medical school somewhere overseas, you can’t say, “Hey Mister, don’t stand with the fridge open.” Can you? He’s a doctor now.
One day Marky Mark, good vibrator, became Mark Wahlberg, good actor. Few objected at the time and even fewer remember those heady days of shirtless music videos.
The point is that names change. People move on. It’s time we did the same thing. There is something rather liberating about saying, “I hate X.” It’s open-ended, hopeful, and not all that specific. What more could you ask for?
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