Apparently, women don’t understand the offside rule. At least that’s according to some TV sports pundit who lost his job recently.
I don’t really understand the offside rule either, so I wrote this on my facebook page in response to the news.
The key to understanding the offside rule is that it doesn’t really matter what the rule is.
Make up any old rubbish, like “Goal keepers must be pipe smokers” and call that the offside rule. It is just as meaningful.
Meh. Hardly my best work, but I thought it just about good enough to post it on my twitter feed too.
That’s where I met… the cult.
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| Set in stone. |
Twitter is famously limited to 140 characters. My message went over that limit by 78 characters. What to do?
“If it’s too long for 140 characters, make it a blog post and post a message with a link.”
Okay, but really? “Read my hilarious thought on the offside rule! http://bit.ly/√ế№Ω” (75 characters to spare! Yay!)
So my twitter readers would see my teaser message. A few may even be bothered enough to follow the link, but they would be disappointed to have made the effort of loading the page only to get such a short message.
Remember, Twitter is for short messages like mine. What can I do keeping within the Twitter ecosystem?
“The 140 limit forces people to concentrate on what’s important. Cut out the flab!”
Okay. I started with the counter at 78 characters over. Time to start trimming down until it fits. I finally got it down to…
It was already a rather poor piece of writing when I started. Now, I couldn’t even find space for the bit about pipe smoking goal keepers. Just take it away and put it out of it’s misery!
So I’d like to challenge the 140 character advocates out there. Can you improve on my effort? Take my original message, trim it down to 140 characters and post it as a comment.
<Update> An anonymous commenter came up with
“It doesn’t matter what the offside rule is. It could be any old rubbish like “Goal keepers must be pipe smokers”. It is just as meaningful.”.
That’s probably the best the could have been done within the 140 limit, but this is the point; Is this shorter version better than my original version? In my biased opinion, no. The whole point of my message was about understanding the offside rule. Lose that word and it looks like I’m commenting on football itself.
It seems there isn’t enough room for big complicated words like “understanding”.</Update>
(Pre-emptive snarky comment: I’ve trimmed out all the bad parts of your message. I can’t post it because there’s none left!)
Picture credits:
“little ref” by Richard Boak.
“140” by Gabriela Grosseck.
It doesn't matter what the offside rule is. It could be any old rubbish like "Goal keepers must be pipe smokers". It is just as meaningful.
The offside rule is.
Anonymous 22:13:
Well done, with one character to spare! That's probably the best my message could be given the contraints.
If I may defend the expressiveness of my original message, I note you had to lose the opening part about "the key to understanding" which puts the message in context for the reader. My comment was more about understanding football rather than football itself.
Pipe smoking goal keepers: just as arbitrary as an offside rule.