In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without Facebook, and Twitter; and darkness was upon the face of social media. That is until the spirit Jack Dorsey and company moved upon the face of cyberspace. And Jack Dorsey said, Let there be Twitter, and Twitter there was. The enigma was that with the limit of 140 characters, tweeps could not fully express themselves and with no jargon in place something had to be done. And so it was…

“Yho chommie you can RT that”, this was a comment made by a friend of mine in response to a segment of a conversation that we were having – she ended the jab with a “Lol” , and I swear she just said the word (no laughs). Now, for someone who was eavesdropping and knew the twanguage , catching up would probably be no obstacle, but imagine the look on a 58 year old (and even a minority of the youth) when she hears this 13th language of South Africa – appauled I tell you.

You dont need to be social media fundi in order to know the 13th language, here’s a few words that’ll let you survive on twitter and let you LOL all the way to your timeline :

RT – Retweeting is the re-posting of an interesting tweet from another twitterer

#PFB  – THIS means (please follow back) . Now with this I wholeheartedly suggest that you read people’s bio’s as some are NOT on #TeamFollowBack, and this could save you possible unattractive reply from the person you’re asking to follow

Twack attack – When a twitter user goes on a rant of exsessive tweets in a short period of time.  Originated from Donald ducks signature “quack attack”

TGIF – Thank God Its Friday

#NW (now watching) , #NP (now playing) and #OOMF (one of my followers)

Subtweet – shortening of “subliminal tweet” which is directly referring to a particular person without mentioning their name or directly mentioning them (talking behind someone’s back but sort of in their face on Twitter)

And something you want to avoid in all circumstances is having a twitter life – the imaginary life created in twitter where you spend all your tempo instead of doing anything productive. Remember that you do have a life to live, start with that and then tweet – ‘coz believe it or not there are people unlike the majority of tweeps, who actually get paid to tweet. And remember, your online status is partially a representation of you so have fun tweeting and dont be apologetic about it.