I’m @cateia97 on Twitter. I’m an actual person. My tweets went viral and I’ve been forced to lock down all of my social media accounts as a result. This attention is completely unwanted.
Someone on my Facebook pointed out that they saw my tweets on here. And so, I dust off the Tumblr for the purpose of making a statement for both platforms because at this point, I have far too many people @ me for me to ever be able to reply to them all. This account will be left to rust when I hit reblog.
Twitter is not and should never be used as a substitute for serious debate. 140 characters means that there is too much that has to be omitted, even in threaded tweets. Sacrifices have to be made to preserve that character limit, and those small sacrifices can lead to critical misunderstandings and misinformation. And without the ability to edit a tweet, the potential for these misunderstandings and misinformation is too great to rely on this platform for authentic discussion, to say nothing of what maliciousness the sense of anonymization brings to the table.
Look, I know that my unintended, so-called “clinic” on linguistics is flawed. (I didn’t call it that and never would have.) It was never meant to be popular. I’ve been on Twitter since 2009. Until this week, any academic-related post I’d ever made before had been completely ignored. Not even one “like”. I fully expected this to be the same. I never expected to be retweeted and linked to by Hollywood actresses, authors, journalists, etc. I had to lock my account because the attention is too much for this nerdy introvert to handle and remain sane. It will not be reopened for a long time, if ever again. I have 2,000 new followers that I never wanted (though some are genuinely neat people and I hope they stick around) and a rolling follow request queue of 200+ despite my best efforts to knock that number down.
On to the specific criticisms:
I don’t do jack shit for RTs or likes. I tweet what I tweet because it pleases and/or interests me. If I had intended for the thread to blow up, I would have actually @ that RoguePOTUS account. Someone else did that, without asking. I wouldn’t have given permission if they had. As a result, the account did, in turn, @ me and lo, the pitchforks descendeth.
I included my academic background because many of the followers I had at the time didn’t know about my “former” life as an academic. I’m in web and game development now. One area of focus was historical linguistics, which isn’t quite as nuanced as theoretical or applied linguistics. I see a lot of people poking at my tweets because of this, which is fine, but one needs to consider there is a difference. And I *was* considering writing a longer, fleshed-out, cited blog post about this topic (not anymore!), but the tweet thread was more of me thinking out loud in the moment. Which I do. Because it’s my Twitter and I tweet what I damn well please. Anyway, I’d seen a couple of spelling oddities from the account in question and they resonated with me because they looked like what I’d grown accustomed to seeing in transliterated texts during my studies. I’ve also taken some German, French, and Russian in the past. And based on my personal experience with people who speak English as a second language (my partner and his family are immigrants, several family members have married immigrants, my Classics professors were from Greece, and I tutored/edited for ESL students at Uni), they ALL have said they learned conversational American English by consuming our media. It was just a weird confluence of my lived experiences that led to a “well, what if” moment when I saw the misspellings.
I know well that two tweets don’t constitute “proof”, and that word is the very first thing I’d change if I could. At the time, they hadn’t tweeted enough to get a better sample. I honestly haven’t visited the account’s page since because I now have them blocked. I did mention in replies to others that there are other tells with the account in question that, when taken in consideration with the linguistic oddities I pointed out, reveals a pattern that indicates the account is not what they purport to be. Is it conjecture? Sure. But it’s not like I didn’t have some kind of a base for making the connection that I did.
Yes, I know a language is not just its alphabet, etc. but I wasn’t going to go into specifics when I was just thinking out loud. That said, the Greek alphabet *is* one of the parent systems of both the Coptic and Cyrillic alphabets. This is easily verified with a click over to Wikipedia, ffs.
I did mistakenly flip the terms diphthong and digraph. So, properly, QU is a bastard of a digraph. I know the difference between the two, I just flipped them. Probably because diphthong is such a fun word that it sticks in my head. So, I made a mistake. HOLY SHIT, I’M A FUCKING HUMAN. Again, I was thinking out loud with my tweets, not writing a dissertation in 140-character chunklets.
I fully acknowledge that shortened spellings could have been the result of trying to fit the tweet into the 140-character limit. I was talking about *spelling*, not that they were shortened.
I’m not sure where it was decided that I was shaming people who don’t speak English. My point, which I thought was clear but I guess not because holy shit, was that people who aren’t native speakers often struggle with our phonics and how to spell things in English. So do native speakers. THAT’S BECAUSE ENGLISH IS FUCKING DIFFICULT. There’s no shame in making mistakes. I tutored ESL students for FREE because I wanted to help them, so why would I shame non-native speakers? But because Twitter and many other social media outlets are positively flooded with fake accounts, looking for mistakes like this is one way to determine if the account you’re following is actually who they say they are.
I typically present as female. I cannot begin to express my absolute disgust with the amount of gender-based bullshit thrown my way because of this series of tweets. OH YEAH, I’M GOING THERE. If you don’t agree with someone, it’s not difficult to simply SCROLL PAST IT. If you see a flaw, it’s not difficult to simply say “Hey, I see where you’re going, but I think you meant [x].” And I see you, GamerGate scumbags. There is absolutely no fucking need on this entire spinning rock to attempt to suss out my employer, my personal contact information, my friends, my family, or anything else because you didn’t like that a woman dared to open her mouth. Seriously, there was a lot of “HOW DARE SHE” followed by “DRAG HER”, with no reason given. Endless attempts at character assassination based on my Twitter bio, username, pictures, and the like. Several hacking attempts. I can’t tell you how many accounts I blocked because two separate men ranted for TWO DAYS about me on their own accounts and then, when they’d whipped their own followers into a frothing, rabid frenzy, finally had the spine to @ my handle and send those dogs piling onto me. I saw at least 3 separate men take my entire argument, present it as their own with minor wording changes, and then start @ big-name accounts to get “their” argument to go viral. HUNDREDS of other men paraphrased me and then, ONLY WHEN PRESSED, admitted they read it from me and finally @ me. And the reason I’m calling this bullshit out is because shortly after the thread began to go viral, I switched my profile pic from me in cosplay to a cat meme. Afterward, people consistently misgendered me as he/him, and in those same tweets, generally praised my assessment. If it was pointed out later that I was female, I became a tin-foil-wearing, game-theory-spitting, Certified Crazy Cat Lady who wasn’t possibly credible in any way. I wish, before my mentions became a flaming pit of despair, that I’d gotten screencaps of some of this crap because it gave me goddamn whiplash.
So, in summary, yes, I am human. There were flaws, I own them. And now, I am leaving this whole thing behind and going back to getting hype for Mass Effect Andromeda, shitposting, and punching all the Nazis. Use your critical thinking skills, kids. FUCKING VERIFY EVERYTHING. ALWAYS. FOR THE SAKE OF HUMANITY. And for my Classics and History peeps, you absolutely have a place both in the Resistance and society at large. Don’t let those STEM folks make you think you’re worthless. We need you now more than ever. You bring balance to the Force.
