When we were young, my sister was going out with someone called Will Lee and I was going out with someone called Jon Thomas and people were like: “Why don’t you two just admit that you don’t have boyfriends, rather than put us through this farce?” And we were all: “No, no, these are real people. There genuinely are parents in the world who think nothing of calling their sons slang names for penis.” “Yeah, right,” everyone said, and we replied: “Hello? Dick much?”, and they said: “Dick Much? Is that your other ‘boyfriend’?”
Anyway, I split up with Jon Thomas (lol, no, we were never really going out, he was somewhat out of my league), while my sister stayed with Will Lee and now no one ever laughs at his name. About 15 years in, we just got tired.
This is why I don’t want to leave Twitter, whatever happens to it: every now and then, I am seized by the desire to tell a large number of people about a tiny thing that happened, long ago, before the internet. Perhaps it will have a consoling life lesson at the end, for anyone else out there with a double-entendre name; perhaps it will contain no wisdom at all. I just want to say it. Some people have made lasting friends on Twitter, and still others find rich troves of expertise in the fields of law, warfare and immunology. They achieve that by having serious minds and steering clear of dog videos. Not me.
As people leave in their droves after Elon Musk’s purchase, another tweeter distilled the problem, saying she was “too old for TikTok, too young for Facebook, too weird for LinkedIn, not weird enough for Reddit, too ugly for Instagram”, and I was able to acknowledge @keelyflaherty’s joke while simultaneously stealing it, by the simple act of retweeting. I didn’t have to figure out whether she was a real person or just a “fan account for the 1996 movie Twister”, as her Twitter bio says. I didn’t need to do a deep dive into whether it really was her joke, or she had stolen it from @dhtoomey.
So there are two things I treasure Twitter for: stealing and babbling. And don’t say “go to Mastodon”, it would be like trying to teach a dog to crochet.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
