#Tagdef

Once a word hashtags, the shades of gray are removed. (Movies do this too, as a recent film is brought to mind.) Twitter has a tendency to hijack a word, much as the word "gay" has been. Now it might be "grey".

John McFee recently riffed on this in his essay Frame of Reference. Familiar concepts usually contain a constellation of words. As time passes the concepts fade, much like the memory of people in photographs: without captions the people in them all are strangers; the glue in photo books breaks over time and the rubber bands disintegrate. Twitter meanings are (at least in the short term) etched in "digital stone", but will erode (get redefined) over time. But some may remain permanent with singular meaning. #Tagdef

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