History of "bae"; Twitter-searching via Topsy

[Neal Whitman]

There were a few messages about 2013 WOTY that discussed "bae"; for
example this one:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ADS-L;672446ef.1312A

On Visual Thesaurus I've written a column tracing the history of "bae":
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/bae-watch-the-ascent-of-a-new-pet-name/

The piece includes summaries of several memes involving "bae" (all
suggested by Ben, BTW), starting with "bae caught me slippin'", written
up by Grant Barrett in his nominations; continuing with "cooking for
bae"; finishing with "you got a bae? or nah?"

In writing the column, I made great use of Topsy.com, a search engine
that has partnered with Twitter in order to make the tweet-ome
searchable. I didn't realize the need for such a search engine until I
found via Google that the earliest tweet containing "bae" was from 2005,
the year before Twitter started up. When I tried to search for that
tweet, all I could find was the user's Twitter feed, with the latest
tweets up top, and no apparent way to jump back years at a time. Topsy
allowed simple searches of all tweets from "all time", which could be
sorted old-to-new. Many times, it still won't take you to the precise
tweet, but it does give the entire tweet and some information about the
time ("2 years ago"; you might be able to get more specific data, but
that probably comes with the premium service).

However, as I was finalizing the column, there were one or two tweets
that I wanted to have a closer look at, but which didn't turn up in the
search when I re-ran it. I don't know if these tweets were removed by
the users, or what. If any of you can comment on this, it would be
useful information.

Neal

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org