History of "bae"; Twitter-searching via Topsy

[Hugo]

Interesting article, and Topsy looks like a great tool, thanks for sharing!
It's limited to 10 pages, but you can remove unwanted terms with a minus,
e.g. "bae -systems -company", and can adjust the time range. A quick search
for the earliest "bae" gives a 21 May 2007, by a London-based graphic
designer:

"a special twitter just for my firned jonny. I luv ya bae! Good luck
tonight :)"

https://twitter.com/davebowker/status/72279042


> I found via Google that the earliest tweet containing "bae" was from
2005, the year before Twitter started up.

The 2005 date sounds like a Google-blip, one of the first ever tweets was
21 March 2006:
https://twitter.com/jack/status/20


> 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.

Generally I doubt the users removed them, more likely the Twitter search
API is a bit flaky. There are (command-line) tools to download someone's
tweets, but it hits a limit at just over 3,000 tweets, so in many cases not
so helpful for verbose tooters. Anyway, here's a good one:
http://www.github.com/sferik/t It can be a bit tricky to set up, but you
can then run it like this: "t timeline username --number 9000 --csv >
username.csv". The 9000 is just an upper limit, it'll stop after about
3,200.


>From the article:

> The earliest example of someone making this connection that I've found is
this tweet from 2011:

> My girl hates being called bae but i still call her that bc it stands for
Before Anyone Else

That's from 2 August 2011.
https://twitter.com/HeavyD_EyeSee_K/status/98156130085240832

Here's a 19 Jul 2011:
"BAE = Before Anyone Else"
https://twitter.com/iPunch_UglyKids/status/93228372049661953


"Bae" is still running high in Twitter's new favorite words, loved words,
hated words, and not-words found by @favibot, @lovihatibot and @nixibot.

Hugo

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