Henceforth I am to be known as J. And our esteemed magazine shall be P. It seems that one-letter names are the new hip nomenclature, and that the distillation down to a singular letter is the very definition of efficiency.
It doesn’t matter that there are only 26 letters in the alphabet. We could be more international in our viewpoint and add in the Greek alphabet. Maybe the Russian one, too, although that might be fraught with political difficulties. Using the Chinese character set is even more tempting: I have read that the Zhonghua Zihai dictionary contains 85,568 Chinese characters, while the Yìt zì Zìdiăn dictionary lists 106,230.
The problem is that even this isn’t enough for all the hip companies in the world, and typing those characters on a European keyboard isn’t particularly easy.
Nevertheless, Twitter is now known as X. One wag on Twitter/X said it should be called “Twix”, no doubt causing a frisson of excitement for the trademark lawyers. Although sticking two fingers of Twix to Mr Musk might be appealing to some.
Then we come to the obvious question of what to call a tweet, now that Twitter has gone. Some have said it should be a “Xeet”, maybe pronounced “zeet”. Most are simply falling back on the well-established tweet for the time being.
It has been fascinating to watch the social media and branding experts work themselves into quite a frenzy over the abandonment of the Twitter brand name. For myself, I can’t see what the fuss is about – I want to use a service
