Last month, the Twitter account for On The Media, an NPR-affiliated radio program and blog devoted to discussing current trends in media coverage, ran a tweet that contained the phrase “an @Guardian article.” Apparently, this usage is supposed to be grammatically correct. We still have issues with this idea, and we bet some of you do, too.
The tweet, which was published in April, quickly inspired some confusion:
@onthemedia “an @Guardian…” – hey PJ, why an not a? I read handles as “Guardian” not “at-Guardian.” Am I doing Twitter wrong?
— Scott Matheson (@smatheson) April 18, 2014
Not knowing how to go from there, TLDR’s PJ Vogt asked around (most notably to “Grammar Girl” Mignon Fogarty, who’ve we written about on the site before) and came to the conclusion that the question is unanswerable, because it depends entirely upon how you pronounce Twitter handles in your head. Which, of course, invites another question: are you even supposed to pronounce the @’s?
According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who was asked to comment on the subject by a reported from PandoDaily, “Yes, of course you do.” But, since when do we care what the people in charge of the technology we use actually intended for their inventions? After all, the guy who invented GIFs still thinks you should pronounce it with a soft J, and there are countless Internet users who firmly believe that it doesn’t matter what he thinks, because “Graphics Interchange Format” should have a hard G on it. So while that’s probably settled the issue for a lot of people, it hasn’t settled it for us just yet.
In certain contexts, it does makes sense to pronounce the @—if someone asks you what your Twitter handle is, perhaps, or when you’re remarking on something a person on Twitter said and don’t know their name (“@Twitterguy writes…”). But when you actually know the identity of the person—and especially when their handle is their given name—saying the @ feels just a bit weird at times.
I’m not sure very many people would think to read a tweet out loud as “I just love at-Matt Fraction’s new comic book,” for example. Or, as our own Glen Tickle puts it, “If I tweet, ‘Our Friend Bill Nye @thescienceguy,’ I’m not saying, ‘Our Friend Bill Nye At the Science Guy.'”
To me, giving the @ a noticable amount of audible weight in the sentence makes it feel like the medium you’re using is actively trying to intrude on the conversation you’re having. Instead of being about the person or organization you’re trying to showcase, your tweet becomes about the actual artifice of that other Twitter page instead. Sometimes, that’s very useful. Sometimes it’s distracting—and, in the case of that original “an @Guardian article” line, it ate up a character that On The Media could have used somewhere else in the tweet.
If you look at it that way, of course it makes sense for Dick Costolo to be into the idea of always pronouncing the @. Why wouldn’t he want his product to be constantly on the brains of the people who use it, even when they don’t mean for it to be?
Because we are big fans of collecting data here, we want to know what you think. Take the poll below, and let us know why you made the choice you did in the comments.
(via TLDR and PandoDaily, image via Steve Snodgrass)
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