What do you call a user of the Twitter short messaging service who is liked and admired by other users?
A tweetheart! And how do you use the term? Here is an example of how Belgian tennis player, Kim Clijsters, used it in a tweet from the Yahoo-Eurosport site: “Happy Australia day to all my Aussie tweethearts!” It earned her the Tweet of the Day.
I am not a Twitter user, or tweeter, but the terminology of Twitter has been the subject of many conversations. While this social media has been emerging at an incredible pace, some of the terminology around it is quite well developed. The glossary provided by the Twitter service contains the basics. But it doesn’t list all the good (and bad) terms that have sprung up around the service.
Some of the terms that don’t work so well are impossible to pronounce. The list in this article on About.com contains designations, like Twitpocalypse, which is defined as “the moment when the identification number of individual tweets surpassed the capacity of the most common data type. The Twitpocalypse crashed a number of Twitter clients.” The motivation behind the name is clear, though.
This article* in the quarterly webzine of the Macmillan English Dictionaries, MED Magazine, has a very nice list of twitterisms. I would consider most of them quite well-motivated. If you don’t want to check out the link, here is another example: What group do people belong to whose tweets attract a large number of readers? The twitterati.
*BIK: Unfortunately this article was removed recently.
Here is one that several German terminologists approved of the other day at a meeting in Styria. The house in the picture on the left was designed by architect 
I also saw a good example of what I would consider a poorly-motivated term. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture. But you are probably all familiar with candles that have a fragrance, some are obnoxious, some are pleasant. They are referred to as fragranced candles. And then industry invented something called defragranced candle. When you look at the term it makes you think that a candle was produced, fragrance was added in the process and then removed again. I am not an expert in candle making, but that is the image I got when I read the term. It distracted me enough that I didn’t buy the candle.