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They made the joke of having first typoed the name of the company as "Twatter", before fixing it up to "Twitter". Visualizing a backspace in text as ^H is an old joke rooted in the backspace control character being ascii 08, which also maps to Ctrl-H.

The joke is intended to be funny because "twat" is a vulgar and generally derogatory term, and the author almost but not quite applied it to either a large company or (transitively) to its users.

I hope explaining the joke made it even funnier!



Thanks for the excellent explanation!


ah, I was unfamiliar with the connotation between ctrl-H and backspace.


Another cliched^Wcommon joke relates to the werase ("word erase") character in TTYs. As you'd guess, it kills the previous word, and is typically bound to ctrl-W.




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