It’s all about tweeting history

If our outgoing President can reduce his traditional farewell address to 15 minutes of revisionist history and “Th-th-that’s all, folks,” why can’t the rest of history be reduced to fit the Twitter format?

With only 140 characters to work with, it would be a cross between haiku and headlines.

In fact, back in the day when newspapers employed teams of professional copy editors with facile vocabularies to check facts, spelling and grammar, write headlines and cut copy to fit the space allotted, one of the ways to pass the time between stories was to imagine how historical events would play today.

For anyone who has never had to do it by hand, writing headlines then was all about getting the character count just right so all the lines come out even. Ms and Ws take up way more space than ls and ts, for example.

The Second Coming was never much of a challenge. It would be on the top of the front page, in the biggest type available, and, after 1982, it wrote itself: He’s baaaaack! (and adjust the number of vowels to fit).

But what about a story from the international wire about a girl executed for heresy? Maybe not front page, maybe a three-decker inside, something like:

Joan of Arc
has her day:
auto-da-fe

What would a live tweet from the scene be like today? “That crazy French girl is so hot” takes up only 32 characters, so the possibilities are endless.

How would you have tweeted from Big Events – and which ones? The Gettysburg address? Pearl Harbor? Inside the second World Trade Center tower?

Let’s call it Twistory: Knock yourselves out with one tweet per event — and leave them right here in the comments box.

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