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everyword goodbye
Creator Adam Parrish: 'It's kind of a magical writing experiment.' Photograph: tktkkt
Creator Adam Parrish: 'It's kind of a magical writing experiment.' Photograph: tktkkt

Creator of @everyword explains the life and death of a Twitter experiment

This article is more than 9 years old

In 2007, Adam Parrish created an enormously popular account to tweet the English language a word at a time. He explains why he did it and what he learned

After seven years and 109,000 tweets, @everyword, one of the internet's most beloved bots, is retiring. In 2007, computer programmer and poet Adam Parrish set out to tweet every word in the English language in alphabetical order, amassing 95,000 followers along the way. On Friday 6June, the project will finally be complete. To mark the end of an era (and the alphabet), Parrish tells the Guardian what the project has taught him about people and the internet, and why it doesn't matter that "sex", "weed" and "vagina" are its most popular words.

Why did you start @everyword?

In late 2007, Twitter was a new thing. It was an exciting time, but I was a Twitter skeptic. The way I saw it, people were posting meaningless things, totally out of context. I wanted to satirize the brevity of Twitter messages would be to make a bot that would post individual words. But now I see Twitter differently. It's kind of a magical writing experiment, and it's amazing that so many people participate.

I was also inspired by different writers and artists, like Kenneth Goldsmith's "uncreative writing". A digital art piece called "Every Icon" gave me the idea to call it "everyword".

I never thought "Oh man, this is going to go viral! I'm going to sell it!" I just wanted to express an idea I was working through as a writer myself.

Where does the library of words you use come from?

I honestly don't remember. It's a list of words that I downloaded from a website somewhere. It's not the OED. One of the purposes of @everyword is to raise the question of whether it's possible to have a canonical list of the English language. To me, the obvious answer is no. We come up with new words all the time. We have rules about what can and cannot be words and linguists don't know where to draw the line any more.

You wrote on your blog that @everyword is more than just a stream of randomized words, and it's all about context. What does that mean?

Words aren't just things that we write and use in our speech. They are also things we think about individually. Like sex, weed, swag – when they're not in a sentence, we can also think about them individually. Everyword raises that question of thinking about a word just from that perspective, as a social object.

On the other hand, because @everyword is inside an individual person's Twitter stream, the words take on the context of whatever else is in the stream at the time. There's the possibility of weird serendipitous interactions between a word in your stream and some other tweets. The word "super" might be tweeted, and then you read a tweet about a school superintendent or Superman movie.

whimsy

— everyword (@everyword) April 27, 2014

Whimsy is something that I'm very interested in evoking in people. I don't like the concept of personalization on the web. When I get on the internet it's because I want to have a shared experience. I want to see what other people see. The internet is a way to find out what life is like for other people. One of the goals of the stuff I make is to produce these experiences, and not sell you something, which is what a lot of the internet is about these days.

Have you experienced any particularly memorable sequences?

The most recent one, from just the other day, was during Apple's WWDC conference. @Everyword was tweeting "zealot" and "zealotry" during part of the conference, while all of the Apple fans, or "zealots" on my feed were going nuts about what Tim Cook was announcing. But those associations are all completely personal. It depends what else you've got on your feed.

Does @everyword receive much criticism?

People will vociferously object to a word, saying "That's not a word! That's wrong! That's ridiculous!". Like the word "sext" got tweeted, and a lot of people were pissed off.

Oh come on @everyword, "sext" isn't a real word.

— Claire Siegely (@SiegeFeathers) February 9, 2013

Then some other people will say "Whoever you are, you should get a job, this is ridiculous." But I actually don't spend much time on it at all. The original program took barely any time. The main work that I do is in making fixes to @everyword when Twitter messes up.

Twitter has changed a lot since 2007. As an artist, do you still see it as a place to play around, or has it become too commercial?

In its early days, because of ven-cap funding, Twitter wasn't thinking about monetization. They were just really encouraging developers to work with it and do interesting things. There was no concept of ads or promoted tweets. Now things are different. They've changed the API and some of the things that were easy to do are now difficult.

sellout

— everyword (@everyword) January 26, 2013

The flipside is, more people use it. As an artist, it's disappointing that the medium has been converted into this very commercial, focused platform, but on the other hand I get to have a huge audience for an experimental writing project. It's a huge privilege and I definitely have Twitter to thank for that.

Who else is doing work that you like?

The bot I really like right now is called @streetnsheets, which takes the phrase "I'm a _____ on the streets and a ____ in the sheets" and randomizes the words to fill in the sentence. 


Do you have a favorite word?

My answer for it is probably kind of awful, but it's "the". It's a really weird word. We think of it as a throwaway word that doesn't mean anything but it really means a lot. And learning how to use it is really difficult for people learning to speak English for the first time. Viewing it from the outside, if you're not an English speaker, it's a weird, alien, mysterious thing.

The most retweeted words are sex and weed. What do you think that means?

I have a different interpretation of the list of most favorited words than I think most people do. It has all of the obvious shock words, that have taboo connotations. Words like "sex", "vagina", "titties" – there's a big overlap, a big cross-section of people who those words are going to appeal to, and I think that's why they have such a high RT count.

sorry

— everyword (@everyword) April 26, 2013

But it's really the fact that we have "sorry" and "ugh" and "what" and "why" that makes me feel good about @everyword being a thing that makes people think about language and how it works. There are a lot of people out there who are super interested in language and who enjoy having this linguistic challenge put up in their faces every day.

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