One Dickens of a Tweet

I have a cordial disagreement with some of my younger ministerial colleagues about Twitter. I think that, on its best day, it's a useless distraction that cramps thought, erodes language and promotes superficial reactions instead of reflection. They think that I'm old, stodgy and outdated, which gives me hope since I thought I was a curmudgeon and a grump.

On the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, writers for The Mirror imagined what his great novels would have been like if he had tried to shoehorn them into the shallow straitjacket of a 140-character Tweet. Someone might note that the hypothetical Tweets do convey the meaning of the novels.

Of course, to know whether that's true or not, you have to have read the novels first. Dickens' famous short story A Christmas Carol is just shy of 29,000 words and probably would have needed around a thousand Tweets to be sent in its entirety (I'm figuring an average of 5 characters a word -- counterbalancing the frequency of short words like "a" and "the" with the many long words that enamored Victorian writers like ol' Chuck). Great Expectations, at 184,000 words, might have required as many as 6,500. Either way, those are some tired thumbs; at least with a book you can use the rest of your fingers and even set it down on something.