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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

Hi, birdwatcher here. I resent the implication that the time honored tradition and enjoyment one gets from watching birds could be used as a metaphor for adjudicating the integrity of bad actors on social media. One is a graceful reflection on the pristine experience of being alive, the other is a form of policing bad behavior. It is a shame they had to soil such a worthy endeavor as birdwatching with this name.

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Maybe some kind of sewage treatment metaphor would be more apt?

GuanoWatcher

Turdwatcher rhymes better

TurdPolish

I guess use Birder, birding. Those are the “insider” terms. (I got this from how to be an imposter article by the Audubon head in nytimes magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/magazine/how-to-be-an-imp...

Given that it's Twitter, I humbly suggest "bird dogging".

Twatting.

Twitterati would have been a much more apt/fun name.

Twaughtpolice?

Twat Police?

Hi. Twatwatcher and lover here. I resent the implication that a twat is a bad thing which need policing.

Yeah, one meaning of the word is synonymous with "fool", but let's not encourage overloading the word since one of the meanings is related to that which is necessary for human life (and is also quite fun) with stupid human behavior.

Ironically It's an implication that something of which is policed is a bad thing.

In my experience, having lived in a few English speaking countries, "twat" is commonly understood as a fool, whereas it's derivative "twot" can be used to describe either a fool or for female genitalia. So given this distinction, I am very much pro twot but anti twat.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twat

I get that. I am familiar with the common usage of that word, although I have never seen the spelling with 'o'. The spelling with 'a' appears in dictionaries with definitions including both meanings.

I'm just objecting to the common usage (and also trying to make a joke related to the Birdwatcher objection above).

It's fascinating and unfortunate that (slang) names for human sexual organs often get used as derogatory adjectives for people.

That guy is a d-ck! She's a real tw-t. What a c-nt!

Likewise, the overloading of f-ck is a shame too.

Edit: fixing formatting stuff related to asterisks.

I've long since lost count of project/product/company names that hijack and overload existing terms with new, possibly opposite meanings. I don't like it either, but if you don't want that you'll essentially have to emigrate from humanity.

Then again the beautiful, pleasing sounds of birds tweeting has also been used as a metaphor for short form posts, many of which are not at all beautiful or pleasing.

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