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  • Poet explains why he spammed Twitter with every word in the English language

    by 
    Sharif Sakr
    Sharif Sakr
    06.08.2014

    zealots - everyword (@everyword) June 2, 2014 Approximately 109,150 tweets. Spread across seven years. Posted automatically by a bot which, each time, simply grabbed a single word from an already published (and inevitably outdated) canon of the English language and threw it out onto the social network. The bot was the brainchild of a poet, Adam Parrish (aka @everyword), whose original intention was simply to the "satirize the brevity of Twitter," but who gradually came to see the project as a "magical writing experiment." He learned, for example, that his 95,000 followers had a penchant for words that felt like they told a story, even when they weren't expressed as part of sentence: words like "sex," "weed" and "vagina," which each got around 2,000 retweets. If you read The Guardian's interview with @everyword, you'll see that his other big discovery was about how people imputed meanings to words that were entirely personal or based purely on coincidences in their Twitter feeds -- like how a tweet of the word "zealots" apparently became tangled up in the chatter of Apple fans in the midst of WWDC.