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Pen Ultimate / Keep it short, twit By Michael Handelzalts Tags: Twitter, Israel News Last week I was tackled by a fellow laptopublicuser (a person using a laptop in public) at a cafe that I frequent, and he asked me whether I knew the origin of the word "text." I willingly admitted my ignorance, and he obliged by spinning a yarn about how it shares a common root with "texture" and "textile." That sounded intriguing, but while I trusted my interlocutor, I nevertheless went online to check this out. I discovered, indeed, that the etymology of "text" is: "Middle English, from Anglo-French tiste, texte; from Medieval Latin textus; from Latin, texture, context, from texere - to weave" (Merriam-Webster). The Online Etymology Dictionary provided a beautiful quote by Canadian poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst ("The Elements of Typographic Style"; 1992): "An ancient metaphor: Thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth." This gives a whole new meaning to the oft-used word "subtext," as in Stanislavsky's theory of acting, which involves laying bare the unspoken, concealed meaning of a spoken text. Thus, any text, when decoded by an accomplished reader, becomes "The Emperor's New Clothes" - made of words. Advertisement "All the world's a text," Shakespeare could have written. And indeed, if "in the beginning was a word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1), and if God had created the world, in the beginning, by saying "let there be light; and there was light" (Genesis 1:3) - then the world is a text. According to the kabbalistic work "Sefer Yetzirah," God created the world, by using the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. But that's a whole long, different story, and our world today is not abuzz with text, but with text messages. If, in the not-so-distant-past (1964), Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "the medium is the message," the medium of 2009 seems to be the "tweet" - a message of 140 characters at most, posted on the Web via Twitter, that allows all your friends and relations to follow and disseminate your (short) thread of thought. One can even embellish this metaphoric fabric further by claiming that nowadays "the tweet is the message" - or rather: "The text message is the message." But that's not much cloth to work with. It would likely constitute a mere miniskirt or a G-string, covering far less than meets the eye. Let me clarify here that I do not Twitter yet, but I guess sooner or later we all will, because if Barack Obama can (and did) - we certainly can! But before rushing in where angels fear to thread, I wanted to know why the length of the messages sent on Twitter was limited to 140 characters. When I embarked on the quest, I had high hopes that that decision was a sort of a virtual-digital homage to the fact that the sonnet, one of the most intricate and yet simple literary forms of poetic text, consists of 14 lines. But this was not to be: The 140-character limit was set by one of Twitter's "ancestors" - the "short message service" (SMS) sent via cellular phones, which is limited to 160 characters. A tweet can be only 140 because it has to allow for the Twitterers' name and the @ sign, indicating the beginning of the message itself. This then raises the question of who came up with the 160-character stipulation in the first place. And we have a culprit: His name is Freidhem Hillebrand, a German, who in 1985 sat at his typewriter in Bonn, and experimented by tapping and typing out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper. As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces, and discovered that on average, each blurb ran on for a line or two, and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. A communications researcher, Hillebrand and his colleagues sought to standardize a technology that would allow cell phones to transmit and display text messages, which, due to technical constraints, had to be as brief as possible. By trial and error, he came to the conclusion that 160 characters are "perfectly sufficient" for a coherent message. While he apparently did not have sufficient market-research data, he had a convincing argument: An average postcard, the snail-mail form of text messaging, often contains fewer than 150 characters. We all know that 160 characters are perfectly adequate to express what we have to say when we are in a hurry, even if typing out words on cell phones does take time. And we have even cleverly developed a sort of shorthand (actually "short-finger") script, to economize on characters - e.g., 4 me & 4 u. As time whizzed by, the character-number constraint evolved into an ideology. Now there are Twitter aficionados (such as Lior Kodner, "Twitter revolution / Let's put a length limit on everything," Haaretz, May 12), who believes "short is beautiful" - or, in his words: "This [Twitter limit of 140 characters] revolution in concision ought to spread to academia, the courts and even culture and art ... Limits would cause writers to aspire to be concise and to sharpen their message ... Twitter proves that it is possible to transmit even big ideas concisely." One cannot argue with that. Ars longa, vita brevis - and life is too short (120 years max) to spend devising texts longer than 140 characters. Or, as Polonius puts it (Hamlet 2, ii): "brevity is the soul of wit." The fact that Polonius himself is most garrulous, and prompts the Queen to chastise him by saying, "more matter, with less art," is actually an idea that is much too long to explain in a Twitter message. Being concise is not a new, Internet-invented, idea. The great sage Hillel, when asked by a gentile to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot, replied, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor" (that's 53 characters - which teach a lot about character). But Hillel added (still not exceeding the limit), "that is the whole Torah while the rest is commentary; go and learn it" (71 characters). In the beginning there was the sound bite, followed by text messages and now eclipsed by the tweet. As Kodner rightly points out (in 107 characters), "the age of television and the Internet demonstrates that the public finds it hard to absorb long messages." Therefore, the concepts we are being taught to grasp, via the television and the Internet, can actually be expressed on a T-shirt. I'm fine with that, really; I wear size XXXL. There are those who claim that such communication - by ultra-short messages - will end with the shrinking our attention span to that of a goldfish. Don't be tempted to agree with them: A tweet has been posted, proving, in 137 characters, that goldfish have an attention span much longer than humans. My only problem with the short messages is that they have a propensity for "typos" - understandable when you want to post a brief message and send it round the world asap. And this is how the above-quoted "brevity is the soul of wit" (28 characters) - got sent out as "gravity is a bowl of twit." And my tweet to end this column, too long for its own good, is a quote from good old Merriam-Webster dictionary: "twit. Pronunciation twit. Function: noun. Date:1528. 1. an act of twitting: TAUNT. 2: a silly, annoying person: FOOL." (122 characters). Bookmark to del.icio.us   A new Mideast solution Obama looking to persuade Arab states to begin taking steps toward normalization. Iran missile test Tehran says it successfully test-launched a missile capable of reaching Israel.

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