Everyone, it seems, is taking to Twitter.
Just this week, Justin Bieber “took to Twitter” to respond to Seth Rogan’s insult. Footballer Don Jones “took to Twitter” to express his disgust after seeing Michael Sam kiss his boyfriend. Alec Baldwin “took to Twitter” to explain what happened with New York Police.
They weren’t alone (to use another common journalistic cliche).
Louis C.K. “took to Twitter” to complain about math. Kim Kardashian “took to Twitter” to set the record straight about her upcoming wedding to Kanye West. And Amanda Bynes “took to Twitter” to post a picture of herself with her sister.
In fact, if you do a Google News search for the phrase “took to Twitter” (be sure to include the quotes), it returns 14,000 results. When you do the same search for the whole web, Google returns over 34 million.
Look long enough, and it starts to seem impossible to write anything but “took to Twitter” to describe a newsmaker signing on to Twitter to express their thoughts, especially if its to defend himself.
(Full disclosure: I’ve probably written “took to Twitter” a dozen times, and it was noticing my own over-reliance on the phrase that first led me down the rabbit hole of exploring this freshly-minted cliché.)
I’m not the first person to notice. Last March, Eddie Scarry, the assistant editor of The Blaze, noted the phenomenon in response to the Washington Post’s list of banned cliché words and phrases. Fittingly enough, Scarry “took to Twitter” to make the observation.
Who was the first person to use the phrase “took to Twitter”? I tried setting date ranges and searching the phrase on Google, to no avail (the returned results predated the creation of Twitter, which suggested either a glitch in the matrix or some new form of linguistic time travel).
Yet there can be no denying now that the phrase has officially entered the territory of being a cliché, and as someone once wrote about clichés:
“Using clichés is like wearing someone else’s old and dirty clothes. They might have looked good at one time, but they don’t look good anymore.”
I searched Twitter for the phrase and found this tweet, which is perhaps the best summation of the “took to Twitter” ridiculousness:
The problem might be the allure of alliteration in “took” and “Twitter.” Moving forward, one way to avoid using the stock phrase is to use another verb other than “took.” One could write, “jumped on Twitter” or even “turned to Twitter.” But enough with “took to Twitter” — 34 million people got there first, and its novelty wore off long before you signed on.
Kevin Hoffman is the editor-in-chief of City Pages, the alternative weekly of the Twin Cities. E-mail him at kevinhoffman1976@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter: @Panopticon13.
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