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

[Galen Buttitta]

“Mark” didn’t need to be capitalized because in this case it’s a common noun in English.

> On Mar 19, 2018, at 22:55, Mark Mandel <mark.a.mandel at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> 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?)
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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