That's a fine-tuned version of an old tweet. The trouble is, I can't really tweet it like that. Even with the quotation marks, the irony might not come across.
The old version was:
"God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Stove" - my friend Adam suggesting we get a takeaway.
— Paul Fung (@diamondbadger) April 15, 2014
It's clunkier, but less homophobic. Maybe clunky is funnier. I haven't decided yet.
Thinking about this has taken up most of my morning.
I suppose I could tweet the first thing, but include a link to this blog post. That way, I get credit for unclunkiness, but also credit for thoughtfulness. A pejorative use of 'gay', yes. But in quotation marks, accompanied by a URL to an essay on how problematic it is.
My only worry here, is that this post is already pretty clunky. Any goodwill I may have had for my unclunky tweet will immediately dissipate. Or will at least dissipate by the time they read the word "dissipate", which is as clunky as word as you might hope to see.
I could have said that the goodwill I had for my unclunky tweet will "immediately go". 'Go' is much less clunky than 'dissipate.' It's such a clean word: small and round. You could inhale it without even noticing.
Hey, here's a great new joke I came up with.
Hey, my meat paste has just disappeared! I must have accidentally bough dissipâté.
You see?! Jokes.
...
Uh oh.
Uh oh.
A serious spanner has been thrown in the works.
I just tried to search for my original 'Adam and Stove' tweet, and I've found that it's been done before. Three times.
And two of them were done before my original one.
This is heartbreaking. I thought I was so original, but no. I am not original.
Luckily, none of them are as good as either of mine. Let's take a look.
I gays got mad at people marrying kitchen appliances they'd be all "It's Adam and Steve not Adam and Stove!"
— Nicholas Gazin (@NicholasGazin) June 20, 2013
"It's Adam & STEVE, not Adam and Stove!" - gay guy complaining about having to do all the housework
— Brennan (@VerifiedBIB) October 30, 2013
Hey anyone who fucks kitchen appliances: it's Adam And Eve, Not Adam And Stove.
— Matt Koff (@mattkoff) November 19, 2014
The first one has a typo right off the bat, so that's out. Pretty clunky. And not good-clunky, like mine.
The second one gets points for taking an extra leap (leaving out 'Eve' entirely), but it's too ambiguous. Either:
a) The gay guy speaking is Adam, and he's complaining because he'd rather be spending time with Steve than doing the housework
b) The gay guy speaking is Steve, and he's saying that by doing said housework, he has abdicated his own identity and has essentially become the stove.
Who can say? Still, tweet two is my favourite.
Tweet three was only posted a couple of days ago. That's weird. Is there some confluence of creative energies in the ether?
I think tweet three is just too crude. Sometimes the delicate touch is needed. It's also reducing human-appliance relationships (and, by analogy, gay relationships) to a purely sexual thing. It's not all about "fucking". It's about forming a meaningful connection with another person (or blender or whatever).
So, to sum up.
Tweet 1: ✮✮ (deducted one star for the typo)
Tweet 2: ✮✮✮✮
Tweet 3: ✮✮✮
My clunky original tweet (with the takeaway suggestion): ✮✮✮✮
My fine-tuned tweet (with pejorative 'gay'): ✮✮✮✮✮✮✮✮
Reminder: I rate tweets on a hundred-star scale.
This experience has been humbling, but I'm sure I'll learn from my mistakes.
And yes, I did try to see if anyone else had done dissipâté. But I don't think Twitter searches are sensitive to accents.
Thank God.
***
(Update - just realised I was only looking at the 'Top Tweets' for 'Adam and Stove'. There are loads of others. None better than mine, though. None better than mine.)
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