3 ms·
They made the joke of having first typoed the name of the company as "Twatter", before fixing it up to "Twitter". Visualizing a backspace in text as ^H is an ol
by jsnell 3y ago
They made the joke of having first typoed the name of the company as "Twatter", before fixing it up to "Twitter". Visualizing a backspace in text as ^H is an old joke rooted in the backspace control character being ascii 08, which also maps to Ctrl-H.
The joke is intended to be funny because "twat" is a vulgar and generally derogatory term, and the author almost but not quite applied it to either a large company or (transitively) to its users.
I hope explaining the joke made it even funnier!
- davidhaymond 3y agoThanks for the excellent explanation!
- dmonitor 3y agoah, I was unfamiliar with the connotation between ctrl-H and backspace.
- owenmarshall 3y agoAnother cliched^Wcommon joke relates to the werase ("word erase") character in TTYs. As you'd guess, it kills the previous word, and is typically bound to ctrl-W.