subtweet
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Blend of subliminal + tweet[1]
Noun[edit]
subtweet (plural subtweets)
- (social media) A tweet that refers to another user without tagging their name in the message, so that the user being talked about is not automatically notified; also, not even mentioning their name (let alone forgoing a tag).
- 2014, Daleen Berry, Geoffrey Fuller, The Savage Murder of Skylar Neese:
- But it was also a subtweet, addressed to one person but meant for someone else entirely.
- 2015 February 19, Dean Burnett, “OK, don't read this article about passive-aggressive behaviour. Honestly, it's fine”, in The Guardian[2], →ISSN:
- Curt texts, unanswered emails, Facebook statuses declaring “someone” to be an idiot, the notorious subtweet; if you can communicate with it, people can be passive aggressive with it.
- (by extension) Any social media post of this type, regardless of which service it is posted on.
See also[edit]
Verb[edit]
subtweet (third-person singular simple present subtweets, present participle subtweeting, simple past and past participle subtweeted)
- (social media) To post a message of this kind.
- 2014, danah boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (page 69)
- More often than not, they employed this term when referencing various teen dramas that occurred between friends and classmates that required insider knowledge to decode. In other words, teens subtweet to talk behind someone else's back.
- 2019, Gretchen McCulloch, chapter 6, in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, Riverhead Books, →ISBN:
- A less subtle way of navigating the relationship between the public and the obscure is found in subtweeting or vaguebooking (vague facebooking), the art of posting elliptically about a social situation without naming names.
- 2014, danah boyd, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (page 69)
- (by extension, transitive) To speak obliquely about (a person).
- 2017 January 20, Aaron Blake, “Chuck Schumer sent a pretty pointed message to Donald Trump, right in front of him”, in The Washington Post[3]:
- Schumer's remarks were oblique enough that no one will be able to say for sure whether he was subtweeting Trump.
References[edit]
- “subtweet”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- ^ Olga Kornienko, Grinin L, Ilyin I, Herrmann P, Korotayev A (2016) “Social and Economic Background of Blending”, in Globalistics and Globalization Studies: Global Transformations and Global Future[1], Volgograd: Uchitel Publishing House, →ISBN, pages 220–225