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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1888 Dan Scherlis has pointed me to the recent #thingsdarkiessay TwitterStorm. Khaya Dlanga described it at length in a weblog post a week ago ("Yesterday, a short-lived war broke out between the US and SA"):
A virtual war between the United States and South Africa was full-on yesterday, the weapon of choice being Twitter. Unfortunately, the weapon was an American one too. Of course in the bigger scheme of things, even in the smaller scheme, this was an insignificant spat. The war was fought at 140 characters at a time.
It was between South African blacks and African Americans.
[…] The tweet that caused all the trouble is a certain trending topic that went as follows — before I say, I should explain what a trending topic is. Twitter tracks the 10 most popular topics of the day and ranks them according to popularity. These topics are usually preceded by a hash tag. Allow me to demonstrate. #khayasthoughtleaderblogsucks. That would be a trending topic, notehowtherearenospacesbetweenthewords. Yes. WedothatonTwitter. The native that caused all the trouble started a trending topic that reached number 1. #thingsdarkiessay. That was the topic. One would say for example, “#thingsdarkiessay I have high-high”. Elderly black folks say they have high-high, by this they mean high blood pressure. Perhaps using more words than necessary increases their blood pressure. Maybe they were the original tweeters.
Someone else would then say, “#thingsdarkiessay Stop nonsense”. You get the picture. Completely harmless. Unless you were African American. An avalanche of misunderstanding descended on the South Africans like a ton of 140 character insults.
As a result of the complaints, the Twitter management removed #thingsdarkiessay as a "trending topic".
In explaining the intercultural misunderstanding, Dlanga offers this exchange:
Dream Hampton, (@dreamhampton) who became the first woman editor of The Source Magazine asked me if “darkie” wasn’t “more akin to the N word?” I explained to her “No, here that would be the K word”. She was fine with the explanation, if not completely comfortable with it.
In other words, this is one of those cases, like the Tiger Woods "spaz" debate, where a word that's innocuous in one variety of English is seen as deeply offensive in another.
Dlanga feels unfairly treated by Twitter:
It would seem to me, according to Twitter, tweets Americans find offensive but are innocent to others will not be allowed to be trending topics it seems. Part of social media is that we get to learn about each other. It’s not always going to be just fun, sometimes we have to get a little uncomfortable with one another before we can be truly understanding of each other. Even in our hyper-emotional responses we may pause for a moment, breathe, think and learn something about someone else. They were not wrong in their outrage, nor were we when we joked about things darkies say. What was wrong was the inability to try to understand or explain why we held the views we did. Most of the responses were emotional, not rational.
And this feeling leads him to a little anti-American joke:
At some point I even tried to get the US Embassy (@USEmbPretioria) to intervene, they responded by saying, “@Khayadlanga has more pull power with Twitter than we ever will”. The comment was followed by a smiley face. This response was enough for my over-inflated ego. It’s true, flattery will get you anywhere. All I need is flattery and oxygen. I am more powerful than the United States. I feel like invading something. Anything. Suggestions anyone? Should we vote on it? I say let’s invade Khanyi Mbau or Julius. Kidding.
But there's an obvious problem, from Twitter's point of view. If a term X is harmless in region A but problematic in B, then not only will right-thinking people in B be offended, but not-so-nice people in B may enthusiastically join in. Whether (and to what extent) Twitter ought to police such things is another question, of course. | 
I love Vimeo's video quality, but unlike YouTube, it doesn't make my uploads iPhone friendly. But that may change: they've already converted all "Staff Picks" and HD video showcases into iPhone and Android-friendly formats, and say there's more to come.
