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I feel bad that I can't get over the fact that a Mastodon message is called a "toot".

It just keeps reminding me of the old rhyme about beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot. (Although in the English of most former colonies that didn't violently rebel, it's pronounced "fart").

I suppose that's the point, it's a nice meta joke punning on tweet, but implying it's all just farting in the wind.



They've changed it recently, to "reduce friction".

https://gizmodo.com/mastodon-toot-retired-twitter-tweet-equi...


As sad as Slack changing it’s iconic first logo


Huh, well that explains it! Thank you for the context :) God I love the Internet.


> (Although in the English of most former colonies that didn't violently rebel, it's pronounced "fart")

Also true in American English. You have two things wrong:

1. The rhyme calls beans "the musical fruit".

2. "Toot" is relevant in that context, being a way you can describe blowing a horn.[1] But obviously, the primary reason for using the word "toot" there is that it rhymes with fruit, not that it's the normal word for farting.

[1] Or sometimes another instrument; there's a tongue twister that starts "A tutor who tooted the flute tried to tutor two tooters to toot."


It has been replaced by a Publish button in the latest release


That's all nice and well, but while "toot" can be both a verb and a noun describing the message that is published, similar to "tweet", "publish" is just a verb - so how do you call a Mastodon message now?


> so how do you call a Mastodon message now?

As you've already done, you can call it a "message", I call it a "post". We don't need every social media site to strictly require their own bespoke terminology merely for the sake of branding.


Do you think the same people who call a question an “ask” have any problems calling a published thing a “publish”?


I guess those people will call it "content".


Are there people who call a question an "ask"? There is a common nounal use of "ask", but that refers to a request or demand, not a question.


Yes, in international English it's already started to drift towards this use.


This is first time I hear about it. Where did you saw it ?


Where I live we also call it “trump”. Which is why many of us never understood why people would claim that Donald Trump has a “powerful name”.

However it did amuse use that a man full of hot air would be named after the expelling of warm but noxious air.


I think the (originally German) name is derived from trump cards - which are also powerful, but in a somewhat different way...


That’s only a modern day theory and feels somewhat retrofitted interpretation of the facts (from what I’ve seen when researching this myself). There are various spellings of the surname, since names often didn’t have a formal spelling in the early days of book keeping. And some of the spellings begun with a ‘T’.

So the more likely scenario is the name was only picked because it sounded similar to their original German family name while being an English-styled spelling.

Given we are taking 30+ years ago though, the best we can do at this stage is speculate.

However even if the card game theory were true, it still doesn’t make Trump a powerful name in the U.K. because the fart connotation is still more prevalent.


Okay, can you please give me a hint as to where that is? As googling "trump fart" just leads to a lot of terrible Youtube videos.


I’m not the GP but in the UK “trumping” is what we call it (amongst other things, lots of fun words for body sounds).




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