Elon Musk wants to turn tweets into ''X's". But changing language is not quite so simple

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Elon Musk may want to send «tweet» back to the birds, but the ubiquitous term for posting on the site he now calls X is here to stay — at least for now. For one, the word is still plastered all over the site formerly known as Twitter. Write a post, you still need to press a blue button that says «tweet» to publish it.

To repost it, you still tap «retweet.» But it's more than that. With "tweets," Twitter accomplished in just a few years something few companies have done in a lifetime: It became a verb and implanted itself into the lexicon of the world. Upending that takes more than a top-down declaration, even if it is from the owner of Twitter-turned-X, who also happens to be one of the world's richest men.

«Language has always come from the people that use it on a day-to-day basis. And it can't be controlled, it can't created, it can't be morphed. You don't get to decide it,» said Nick Bilton, the author of «Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal» about Twitter's origins.

Twitter didn't start out as Twitter. It was «twttr» — without vowels, which was the trend in 2006 when the platform launched and SMS texting was wildly popular. The iPhone only came out in 2007.

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams «went one day and purchased the vowels, two vowels for essentially USD 7,500 each,» when he bought the URL for twitter.com from a bird enthusiast, Bilton said. At the beginning, people didn't «tweet» — it was «I'm going to twitter this,» Bilton recalled. But «twittered» doesn't roll off the tongue and «tweet» soon took over, first in the Twitter office, then San Francisco, then everywhere.