In Austria in 1923, Felix Salten published his novel about the life of a deer: Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde. It took five years, but finally in 1928 the English translation was published: “Bambi, a Life in the Woods.” That’s where it all started.
In 1942 Walt Disney Productions released its fifth animated feature film: Bambi. The original movie poster featured a picture of the book with the label “The famous book-of-the-month becomes the picture of the year!” And it pretty much was the picture of the year, or at least an important one. It received three Oscar nominations: best sound, best song, and best musical score.
One of the songs in the score (not the one that got the nomination) was sung by Friend Owl. It was called Twitterpated, and included the line “nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the spring.” Bambi earned over $250 million in 1942 alone, and “twitterpated wasted no time in becoming popular. That’s not to say that the writer of the lyrics for Twitterpated coined the word. While Bambi did get an awful lot of attention when it was released, its release date was August 13, while on June 11 of the same year, the Mansfield Ohio News-Journal included this: “Dancer Ann Miller and N.Y. Attorney Maurice Weitzelbaum are twitterpated.“
That would have been a big deal. Ann Miller was pretty famous at the time and had appeared in dozens of movies. She was born in 1923, but stayed active in dancing and acting until 2001. She died in 2004, just two years before Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Willams founded Twitter. They were thinking about what happened when you received a text message on your phone. As Jack Dorsey explains: “…your phone would buzz. It would jitter. It would twitch. And those were the early names, Jitter and Twitch.”
But nobody really liked “Jitter” or “Twitch” as names for the service, so Noah Glass went to the Oxford English Dictionary, started at “twitch,” and before long came to “twitter.” Now, “twitter” is listed by the OED four times as a noun and three times as a verb. The noun versions of “twitter” mean “a condition of tremulous excitement,” “the thin part of a thread that is unequally spun,” “someone who quits,” and “a tale-bearer or storyteller.” But luckily Glass passed those by and went for the verbs. Those mean “to tease,” “to spin or twist unevenly,” and the one that caught his eye was “of a bird, to utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp.”
That definition is the one that would most likely be invoked by a cartoon bird, even if that bird is an owl, which is not really a twittering sort of bird in real life. And the term “twitterpated,” which was probably just showing up at the time Friend Owl’s song was being written, was based on the notion of birds being lightheaded and (ahem) flighty. Besides, when you describe somebody as “twitterpated,” particularly if you know “pate” is a very old English word for “head,” it even sounds like someone breathlessly excited, as they might be when spring is just about to arise. Especially when they live outside. In the woods. Where it snows on you in the winter.
So “twitterpated,” meaning a birdbrain who’s excited or thrilled about something (about anything, really, but particularly about falling in love in the spring), boosted by its use in a very popular film, became a moderately common word in the US over the decades following 1942.
Then came 2006, when Jack Dorsey and his pals decided on the name for their new company. They had to buy “twitter.com” from somebody else who had already registered it, but they weren’t really using it so the price was cheap. They named the service, and the company, “Twitter.”
As you may have noticed, Twitter became pretty popular. To a lot of people, though, it still seemed like a silly name, and people asked the founders about it all the time. In 2011 Dorsey gave an interview about the origins of the company and the name, and he admitted that they knew it might not work out:
“When we came up with the name Twitter, we were like, maybe this isn’t the best name for us because in certain cultures it could be demeaning. For example, Twit is not necessarily associated with the best things. But it has been amazing in terms of building the brand because the users have taken it and invented their own vernacular around it, like tweet and twitterpated.”
Hearing that last bit, the interviewer asked “I haven’t heard of twitterpated. What does that mean?”
Dorsey replied: “Twitterpated is when you’re overwhelmed with information or you’re just so excited that you forget to tweet or forget to share.”
He also pointed out that “twitterpated” is in the dictionary, and so it is. But I’m pretty sure Dorsey never actually looked it up, since he thinks it comes from his version of “twitter.” I’m also pretty sure that the founders of ReadMe, another web company, don’t know this story either. You see, Friend Owl was the first popularizer of “twitterpated”, and Readme’s mascot is an owl.
By the way, even the fastest-reacting dictionaries, like the online Urban Dictionary, don’t yet define “twitterpated” as having anything to do with twitter.com. And now that Twitter has been renamed, they probably never will.
