[Ads-l] I'm getting old: What's a DM?

[Mark Mandel]

Here it's certainly not "Dungeon Master
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master>", as when I brought my kids
up playing Dungeons & Dragons.

The newsflyer Metro <https://metro.us> just published an article headlined

President Trump:
*Don Jr. was DMing a model while married to Vanessa Trump
<https://www.metro.us/president-trump/donald-trump-jr-dming-model-vanessa-pregnant>
*
*And it was ... not normal. Very not normal.*
By Michael Martin
Published : March 19, 2018

(It's really not surprising that there are sexual scandals around both DTs.)

It begins

Donald Trump Jr. slid into the DMs of a model weeks after his wife,
Vanessa, gave birth to their third child, People reported
<http://people.com/politics/donald-trump-jr-twitter-messages-model-vanessa/>
.

The couple filed for divorce last week, and one Melissa Stetten wasn't too
shocked. The former model tweeted a screenshot of a DM from Trump Jr. in
2011, with the message "Surprised his marriage didn’t work out since he was
sending me DMs a month after his wife gave birth. (I tweeted a joke about
pulling a muscle changing a tampon and he replied asking if I smelled
bacon? Cool joke)"

Nowhere in the article is "DM" defined, unless you count the image of a
tweet by DTJr with the footer

You can no longer send Direct Messages to this person.

Apparently DTJr has blocked Melissa Stetten.

I searched the web for *define DM*:

   - Urban Dictionary <https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=DM>
   went straight to the point: *Top definition: To send a Direct Message on
   twitter*
   - The Online Slang Dictionary
   <http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/dm> defined and
   gave examples for DM both as a noun and as a transitive verb, both in the
   twitter sense.
   - Other sites were more or less helpful. Dictionary.com
   <http://www.dictionary.com/browse/dm> gave four examples, and even so
   didn't include the twitter sense. But they blamed it all on Random House:

   1. *dm*
   decimeter; decimeters.

   2. *DM*
   Deutsche mark.

   3. *Dm.*
   Deutsche mark.

   4.* DM.*
   direct mail <http://www.dictionary.com/browse/direct-mail>.


*[That is: "mail, usually consisting of advertising matter, appeals for
   donations, or the like, sent simultaneously to large numbers of possible
   individual customers or contributors. Abbreviation: DM."] *

   Dictionary.com Unabridged
   Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018.


So now I know what DM means here, as well as knowing that Metro assumes
that all their readers will know.

Mark (not Deutsche. Shouldn't they have capitalized "mark", since German
caps all nouns?)

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