Tierney Sneed, “Do All These #PopSongs Mean the Hashtag Is Here to Stay?” (U.S. News, May 21, 2013)
“Used in many creative ways, the hashtag ends up being used in jokes, for various memes, for self effacing commentary — a kind of meta-commentary on one’s message,” says Ben Zimmer, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, and a language columnist for the Boston Globe. “It was a very sort of simple straight forward convention that developed on Twitter that people invested with all sorts of special uses.”
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