No, AP, We'll Call It 'X, The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter' Over Our Formerly Known As Alive Body
Even Prince eventually relented.
Super genius Elon Musk torched billions of dollars in brand equity last weekend and renamed Twitter “X,” which all reasonable people understand is stupid. Posting on Twitter had become its own verb — “tweeting” or “to tweet” — while “X” is so generic that Microsoft, Meta, and literally hundreds of other companies have competing trademark claims.
The sensible response to something this idiotic is to just ignore it until it goes away — sort of like Robin Thicke’s career. However, it seems as if the Associated Press has already surrendered to the madness and is updating its style book to reflect Musk’s latest, grandest folly.
White House reporter Seung Min Kim tweeted — yes, tweeted, damnit — on Wednesday:
An update to the @APStylebook:
On first reference, refer to the platform as X, formerly known as Twitter. The term tweet remains acceptable ... Also acceptable is phrasing such as posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter. On later refs: the X platform or X.
Oh, good, we can still say “tweet,” but the AP otherwise expects us to look like fucking idiots and write out “X, formerly known as Twitter” on first reference. Look, language is about communication. We all know what “Twitter” is. “X” is the name of the super spy in my 1990s James Bond rip-off script.
This reminds me of when Prince changed his name in 1993 to an unpronounceable symbol, a combination of the gender symbols for male and female. See, Prince wasn’t a woman. He wasn’t a man. He was something you would never understand … or so I’m told.
Unlike Musk, he didn’t think this was a brilliant branding move. (He obviously didn’t have a vendetta against birds.) He fully understood the value of the name he’d made famous. This was a deliberate middle finger to his record label, Warner Bros.
Sure, he originally offered a characteristically cryptic explanation for the change: “It is an unpronounceable symbol whose meaning has not been identified. It’s all about thinking in new ways, tuning in 2 a new free-quency.”
However, he later admitted his true intentions in this statement:
Prince is the name that my mother gave me at birth. Warner Brothers took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing tool to promote all of the music I wrote.
The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Brothers.
The first step I have taken towards the ultimate goal of emancipation from the chains that bind me to Warner Brothers was to change my name from Prince to (symbol).
He wanted out of his contract with Warner, and if they didn’t release him, he’d make it all but impossible to market any new material from him. (There was some speculation that he believed just changing his name would void his existing contract, but we assume lawyers explained the law to him.)
A desperate Warner organized a mass mailing of floppy disks (it was 1993) with a custom font that would help print media reproduce Prince’s now preferred appellation.
Not everyone wanted to mess around with floppy disks and there was still the problem of actually identifying Prince verbally, so people started calling him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince.” He preferred “The Artist,” which is not surprising.
Hilarity ensued for another five years until Prince, finally free of Warner, reclaimed the name that most people had never stopped calling him in the first place.
This is what will probably happen with Twitter. Musk will eventually leave and the company’s shattered remains will bury “X” and fully rebrand itself as “Twitter.”
So, let’s just skip ahead to that part.
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I assume there is still a cadre of fan-bois talking about how this name change at former-Twitter is the most geenius thing ever. Them rightie narcissists sure do love them some sycophants.
X marks the rot.