“You twit.”
This is not about what you think; this is what a woman said to me when I was a new art director at L.S. Ayres. I had been absorbed into the advertising department by the corporate consolidation of my old position with Stewart’s Department Store with the Ayres’ stores. I did not know the woman well, but I was amused, not offended, by her designation of me as a “twit.” The woman was a powerful presence in the advertising department of my new “art home.” I had not been there long, but I liked the people with whom I worked and was entertained by the antics of the chief name-caller, whose duties were not clear to me, but whose opinions were well-respected. I became friends with the woman, and years later, met her musician sons. When I recalled for one, the legend of “twit,” he laughed, and told me that I was not the only one to bear “twitness” to his mother’s calling out of “twits.”
One of the nouns defined in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for “twit” is “a foolish, stupid or ineffectual person.” I imagine that definition was the one being applied to me and others as we scampered away from the scathing indictment. But there are some other, quite interesting definitions for twit. One verb transitive form is defined as “(to) find fault with, censure, reproach … in a good-humored or teasing way.” This seems an accurate description of my friend’s behavior: she was twitting me by calling me a twit.
Despite being a self-confessed “profane man,” I used to amuse my pool hall buddies when I missed a shot by crying out in disgust, “DRAT!” That old fashioned exclamation usually got more attention than the more robust Anglo-Saxonisms I customarily discharged. Perhaps those old curses can make a comeback. A recent episode of one of my favorite TV shows had one of the principals trying to reintroduce Shakespearean style insults into the popular lexicon. I imagined my L.S. Ayres friend twitting me with something like, “More of your conversation would infect my brain,” from The Comedy of Errors or “Thou cream faced loon,” from Macbeth (though “cream” might not accurately describe my face).
Diving back into my Shorter OED, I found some other interesting takes on “twit.” For instance, a twit can be someone “given to twitting … a talebearer.” To twit is to “tell tales; blab.” For those of you who have never worked in a retail advertising department, let me say that telling tales and blabbing ran rampant among the twits who staffed the offices and cubicles. I once had a rare moment where I was late for work, the result of ignoring my alarm beyond the point of safety. I called to tell someone that, though I was late, I was safe, because the meteor hit the building next to mine. I was shocked to find that my excuse, crafted from whole cloth, was being twitted about the department as if it were true. We twits trust, and do not verify.
It took a deeper dive into my OED to find that a “twit” was also “the shrill chirp or tweet of a small bird.” That explained some things, the least of which was the logo for a popular messaging site. That site could never handle a Shakespearean insult like this one from All’s Well That Ends Well: “A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” How can one object to having one’s face slapped in such an elegant way?