One of the Raj “traditions” that used to make me laugh was the insistence that the First Secretary of the Bengal Government could not see visitors until after he’d fiinished the day’s Times crossword. Never proven, but fun to think about, particularly if you were in a queue in Writers’ Building.

There were many apocryphal stories; one set (of three stories) in particular was of considerable interest to me, given my passion for words and puzzles.

• Charles Napier, when capturing the province of Sindh in 1843, was meant to have sent a telegram with just one word on it: Peccavi.
• Colin Campbell, similarly, is meant to have sent one that just said Nunc Fortunatus Sum when he arrived in Lucknow.
• And, to complete the set, Lord Dalhousie is credited with sending just Vovi when annexing Oudh.

Peccavi. I have sinned. Nunc Fortunatus Sum. I am in luck now. Vovi. I have vowed.

There are many arguments as to whether any of these events actually happened, with people focusing on particular angels and particular pins. For example, it is said that a 17-year old girl named Catherine Winkworth wrote in to Punch to say that Napier should have said Peccavi, and that the Punch cartoon published in May 1844 was directly as a result of the letter, that Napier never said it.

I don’t know the answer, there is no evidence that Napier actually sent the telegram. But there is evidence that Napier was born in Whitehall, that he went to school in Celbridge in Eire, a place with a history of 5000 years of habitation, a place that had a school since 1709, that “Ireland’s richest man” then, William “Speaker” Conolly, built his mansion there at the turn of the 18th century. So there is some likelihood that Napier was educated enough to have said it. As I study the other pronouncements attributed to Napier, I tend to have some sympathy with the view that he actually sent the message, even if Miss Winkworth did write a letter a year later.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t actually matter whether Napier said it or not. What matters is the accessibility of the story.

In the past, the Peccavi story would only have made sense to people who understood Latin and who had a facility with Empire history and geography. A limited set of people.

Today, if Napier were alive and he used Twitter to send his message, he could have sent one that looked like this:

This ability to compress context and associate it with communication is critical. It is an example of what David Weinberger was referring to when he said “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies”.

The implications for accessibility should not be underestimated. In the past, Peccavi was an “in” joke amongst well-read people. Now, it can be shared by all, with links providing the context and background required to “understand the joke”.

I think this is a big deal. It is one of the reasons why the web is different, the ability to associate content and communication with compressed context.

Zeuglodont: A type of carnivorous whale. Now extinct. Also referred to as phocodontia.

Aristology. A word I first came across when I was about ten, when I started reading Rex Stout. Although Stout first used it in Three At Wolfe’s Door, that was not where I happened upon it. It was when I was reading The Doorbell Rang, surely one of the ten best mystery novels ever written.

It was in the reading of Nero Wolfe that I developed a keen interest in food, in all aspects of food. And, I daresay, sometime in my life I will start growing orchids for similar reasons.

What has any or all of this to do with Twitter? It’s like this. Some time ago, during the debate on continuous partial asymmetry triggered by James Governor’s post, Stu Berwick, an old friend and colleague, made a crucial comment. By keeping it short and to the point, he crystallised something that everyone knows but not everyone appreciates. Twitter is both a communications medium as well as a publishing platform.

Now for me one of the ways of testing something as a publishing platform (as opposed to a communications medium) is the depth of language used, the breadth of subjects covered. So I started “testing” Twitter. What I did was enter “random” words into Twitter search, and observe the results. I converted that into a game. The rules were simple:

1. I had to know the word and what it meant
2. It had to be a word that had found its way into the language proper, as opposed to one that was “technically” included, that made its way only because it formed part of an obscure branch of science.
3. The number of results returned had to be zero.

I read a lot. I have been reading voraciously for over forty years. I read widely. And I have a good head for words, coupled with a decent memory. Years of playing around with crosswords and Scrabble have, if anything, sharpened my vocabulary.

Yet it took me several attempts before I found a zero. Aristology was my best for some time, with just one result returned, until I tried zeuglodont. Bugloss returned two, which was pretty good.

Try it. You’d be amazed at just what Twitter already contains. Which bodes well for its existence as a publishing platform, despite the number-of-characters limit.

[Why would I even know a word like zeuglodont? Simple. The way I remember words is by remembering their size and “shape”, where the shape is a pattern represented by the consonant-vowel sequence. When I try and recall a word, the first thing that comes to me is the size of the word. Then sequences of letters come. And finally the whole word emerges. That process is not alphabetical, although I can sometimes help it by going through the alphabet once I have the word’s length and shape. -UGLO- is a very unusual shape in this context, occurring only in two words as far as I know, bugloss and zeuglodont.