Here, in ascending order, are the ten most popular* tweets about language and translation that I shared during 2022 on my @Smart_Translate Twitter account:
The transformation of UK English reflect changes in technology as well as society
- US-to-UK Word Pronunciation of the Year for 2021: “Doon” for “Dune”
- 50 very bad book covers for literary classics
Just one of 50 bad book covers
- The 2021 stronglang award to recognize annual achievements in swearing
- Choose your font carefully
- My photo of the “southern hemisphere” contingent getting together for dinner before the ITI conference in Brighton (incidentally another tweet about my ITI stick of rock also proved very popular!)
With Timothy Barton and Victoria Mendez in Brighton
- My tweet referencing a US vs UK Difference of the Day tweet by Lynne Murphy about “half-staff” vs “half-mast”
- A humorous comic panel by ItchyFeet: things Americans don’t realise are American before going to Europe
- The five best books on slang (as recommended by MisterSlang)
- this was actually more or less equalled by a a whole series of tweets on the 5 best books on language, swearing, US vs UK English, the history & diversity of language, grammar & punctuation, and language & the mind, but for the sake of variety I’ll consider them all in 2nd place
- And the winner is … 14 words that get to the heart of today’s work culture: an article from Dictionarycom
Words about work and work culture
It’s interesting to note that with the exception of the winning tweet (which was about 5 times more popular than the second-placed tweet), most of these tweets were either humorous, covered UK and US English and the differences between them, or talked about slang and swearing.
* ‘most popular’ = top tweets (most engagement & impressions) according to Twitter Analytics.
For more about words and language in 2022 you might be interested in Google’s Year in Search: the top trending searches of the year, and “Extremely hardcore discourse: the words of the year that slipped under the radar” by The Guardian.
Related:
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