Tweet? Tweet?

I just found this brief article detailing a discussion within the ranks of The New York Times concerning the word "tweet."

Basically, standards editor Phil Corbett has advised the staff of The New York Times not to use the word "tweet" when writing about usage of the social networking and micro-blogging site, Twitter. His argument? "...outside of ornithological contexts, "tweet" has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles."

My initial gut reaction was to think that it's stupid to trade "tweet" for "use Twitter," "post to Twitter," post on Twitter," "write on Twitter," "a Twitter message," or "a Twitter update." But then I remembered my reaction when somebody on Facebook claimed that "interrobang" was a real word and challenged everyone to "look it up!" My response was simple, "If it has no hits on Dictionary.com, it doesn't count as a real word yet." So I plugged "tweet" into Dictionary.com and got not one mention of Twitter.

So maybe a "tweet" in the sense of utilizing Twitter is nothing more than slang—albeit helpful slang—and really doesn't have any place in The New York Times.

What do you think?

Rev. Josh