Twitter, when you simmer it down to its base premise, like some kind of unholy stock, is essentially a super-fast way to spread little sentences all around the world. If you like writing and using writing to say things, chances are you’ll thrive on Twitter, which remains stubbornly word-based, a storm of textual sound and fury that is as ferocious as it is brief and transitory.

As a result, Twitter more than any other social media app tends to create its own shared language, a series of phrases and references that pass into common parlance. Sometimes they originate outside the app, but become so enthusiastically used on the platform that they become a part of the communal speech. Often they grow, flower and die entirely in the closed Twitter ecosystem. It’s always been my favourite part of the contentious app, the way language and jokes and written memes mutate and spread, fungal and mysterious. It’s code-switching, but for the incurably online. There are obviously other places where this happens too: Tumblr and Reddit each have their own dialogues, for example, and often there’s bleed between them all. You can track many famous catchphrases and words and terms to things like AAVE (African American Vernacular English), queer ballroom jargon or even popular stand-up comedy sets, but like floating seeds, they settle down and sprout weird and mutated new life on Twitter.