#baffledblogger

An idiom which has spread all round social media is to add a string of words jammed together, prefaced by a hashtag, at the end of an utterance. It often expresses the author’s attitude to what they’ve just described, e.g #baffledblogger

This must have started on Twitter, where the character limit means that extreme concision is necessary. Prefacing the string of words with # means it can potentially be taken up by others as a tag, although the vast majority remain hapax legomena or little used; the longer they are the more likely they are to be unique. I can find three instances of #baffledblogger on Twitter, all apparently independent of one another.

The idiom has spread to other media such as Facebook, where there is no need for concision. Let me now explain why I don’t use it. I’m quite capable of expressing myself, feelings, attitudes and all, within the character limit and retaining spaces between words. Nor have I pretensions to starting viral hashtags, so I only use tags for plausible search terms, or ones which are well established in use.

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