In the future, long after the last human has perished and the internet is the only record of our existence, I hope that whatever life form succeeds us stumbles across this tweet. I nominate this tweet to speak for humanity into infinity; I nominate this tweet to line the virtual galleries of whatever our AI successors choose to replace museums.
This tweet has existed for a day, at most, but already, it has come to define us. I'm talking, of course, about a two-word tweet from one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, otherwise known as Lady Gaga. Those two words? "What’s fortnight."
Gaga! Renounce your Grammys, your Oscar, your BAFTA, your VMAs, your Brits, your Golden Globes. A star was born with this tweet, Gaga. This tweet is your legacy. This tweet is all of our legacies.
What’s fortnightOctober 15, 2019
The tweet, the internet quickly assumed, was about Fortnite, an online video game that I understand the teens enjoy. Among the 24,000 people to respond was Ninja, an astronomically famous Fortnite streamer, who tweeted, "Call me on the Telephone. I'll give you a Million Reasons to play. You and I." I'm now very interested in seeing Lady Gaga and Ninja play Fortnite, even though I'm 800 and don't understand what any of those words mean.
I have one small point to make: Gaga, you'll note, used the spelling "fortnight," and as a Brit who spent a lot of time explaining Britishisms to my American friends, I have a thought. What if Lady Gaga had, for the first ever time, heard the word "fortnight," which I've been told is a very British thing, and just wanted to know the definition? (The definition is two weeks.) I don't know. This whole affair has overwhelmed my brain. Anyway, I'm going to get this tweet tattooed on my sternum.
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Emily Dixon is a British journalist who’s contributed to CNN, Teen Vogue, Time, Glamour, The Guardian, Wonderland, The Big Roundtable, Bust, and more, on everything from mental health to fashion to political activism to feminist zine collectives. She’s also a committed Beyoncé, Kacey Musgraves, and Tracee Ellis Ross fan, an enthusiastic but terrible ballet dancer, and a proud Geordie lass.
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