February 15th, 2012 / 12:32 am
 Snippets
—

La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims are tweets. Pascal’s Pensées are tweets. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are tweets. Wittgenstein kept his tweets in a box. “It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle,” says Wittgenstein. Would you retweet that?

8 Comments

  1. February 15th, 2012 / 1:33 am reynard—
  2. February 15th, 2012 / 1:58 am Miles Vine—

      “Linderrella story of the year jeremy lin has lingle handedly played lensational lincredible I’m linpressed all he does is Lin Lin Lin gd jib” —SHAQ

      “@SHAQ what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence #Linsanity (RT if u agree)” —private_linguist

  3. February 15th, 2012 / 2:13 am Anonymous—

      are you taking the class on pascal, dickinson, and wittgenstein with josh wilner this semester?

      i would retweet that wittgenstein tweet.

  4. February 15th, 2012 / 3:29 am Michael—
  5. February 15th, 2012 / 9:46 am Rick Rofihe—
  6. February 15th, 2012 / 12:40 pm Anonymous—

      did you guys know that st. augustine’s confessions and livejournal are the same thing. did i just blow yr mind

  7. February 15th, 2012 / 1:12 pm deadgod—

      There’s an ancient history (in the Western traditions) of aphoristic literature:  proverbs, jokes, snatches of metered verse, historical one-liners that might actually have happened (Spartans at Thermopylae:  “Molon labe.” –‘Come; take.’, that is, ‘Come and get it.’), and so on.

      Several HTMLG people use twitter to make streams of Qlever Quips and Queries–with plenty of success–; twitter definitely falls squarely into a discursive receptor that its contemporaries already have.

      What else can happen on twitter?  One example:  @VanessaPlace.  Others?

  8. February 15th, 2012 / 9:04 pm JosephPatrickPascale—

      I appreciate it when I see people point out famous, excellent authors who wrote works (aphorisms, poems, maybe even microfiction, etc.) that could have fit into tweets, since it cancels out the negative impression many people seem to have about Twitter representing everything that is wrong with our society’s literacy. It’s interesting to see that the strict 140 character limitation can actually foster more creativity, since it takes a lot of skill to post something that it concise yet compelling. 

      Unfortunately, I can’t love Twitter as much as I would like to after they censored #OccupyWallStreet from the Trending Topics list, and now it is willing to censor tweets that any governments do not agree with in various countries.