Word! The Language Column
Twitter and the long chicken

When he thinks about Twitter in the past, Elias Hirschl gets sad. It used to be the platform for absurd nonsense, for incomprehensible jokes, for new words that ended up in everyday life. An obituary – and an appeal to continue making stupid jokes on other platforms.

By Elias Hirschl

Elon Musk has broken a lot of things, but perhaps the most unfortunate is Twitter. If you go on the platform these days, all you see is hate speech and ads for cryptocurrency scams. But Twitter used to be, at least in part, a wonderful think tank and a place for artistic exchange and internet literature. Although there are now a few new alternative platforms, such as Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads, Twitter shone back then as a unique repository for a special kind of nonsense poetry, where you could grind.

to grind – above all for: work, in the sense of toil, drudgery, the daily grind. In the context of Twitter, the term “grind” describes the act of writing many posts on a particular topic over a period of hours or days.

Simply random

Part of the fun of Twitter was opening the app and finding a post from someone who was in the middle of a grind. For example, you read this post: “he's arresting the long chicken”. Now you have to work out what it is about. Does the post refer to something in particular? Was there a trigger? A recent incident in politics or a scandal in pop culture? For me, as an Austrian, Twitter posts were often a mystery because my bubble is largely made up of German users. I had to find out if I had missed some important development in German politics and therefore didn't understand why “he arrests the long chicken” or sometimes “he eats the long chicken”. Was there a video of a German politician saying something about Burger King's “long chicken” (editor’s note: in German-speaking countries, Burger King labels its “Original Chicken Sandwich” as “Long Chicken”)? Has there been a factory farming incident? Has there been a fairground scandal involving chicken kabobs? Or is it just a shitpost? In other words, a random post by someone who just wanted to spew absurd nonsense into the ether. In this particular case: Yes, it was just a shitpost. The long chicken has no deeper meaning. The long chicken does not have an elaborate origin. Why did the long chicken want to cross the long road? No reason. The long chicken was just a random tweet from the account @schlabrowski one day. The original tweet from 15 August 2021 read “I’m in burger kong at nuremberg main station and opposite me a woman is licking him husband’s fingers”. Below it, the account @enunzo commented “burger kong” along with a photo montage of King Kong eating a Burger King Original Chicken Sandwich. This was followed by another series of comments below where users simply commented “he's eating the long chicken”.

From Twitter to everyday life

Such a situation is most like an evening with friends, where you try to get each other going with jokes about a certain topic. Only here there is suddenly written evidence for everything. You can trace the entire development of a joke, you can study it like archaeological samples, like drill cores in polar ice. Only instead of the ages of the earth, we're talking about jokes about long chickens. You can watch language change live. Sometimes words or phrases that originate on Twitter find their way into everyday language. These words often come from marginalised communities and then find their way into the mainstream.

Jokes nobody understands

A certain amount of freestyle also consists of combining the new meme with existing meme patterns, i.e. joke templates, so to speak. You take the basic structure of older posts and insert the new theme, in other words, you try to find a new twist on already established patterns. You can also alienate the original joke further and further, see how much you can misspell a word so that it is just barely recognisable. It's also possible to reduce the structure of the joke more and more, to make it as incomprehensible as possible, because it doesn't need to be explained anyway. Someone else can take up the joke, doesn’t need to know the original context, can even ignore it completely and create something new. In its radical exclusivity, there is something surprisingly inclusive about it. Don't get a joke? Who cares, the author probably doesn't either. You can still get in, you can just make something new out of it that nobody understands. And so it goes on and on. An endless staircase of stupid jokes. Why do ten different people write on Bluesky, Mastodon or Threads that they have, quote, “$hat” themselves? I have no idea. It doesn't matter. The important thing is that you can be there too. You can $hit yourself too.