• twitterpated •
Pronunciation: twit-êr-pay-did • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: 1. In a state of nervous excitement. 2. Infatuated or obsessed with something, such as Twitter.
Notes: Although this word antedates the social medium Twitter by 64 years, we can see how the sense of this word is getting associated with that web presence. People do get excitedly obsessed with Twitter. Twitterpated implies a verb, twitterpate, carried by no dictionary, though a few do list twitterpation.
In Play: This word was used originally in reference to a scene in the movie Bambi: "Remember in Bambi, when Thumper was in love, the wise old owl said he was twitterpated?" But now that Twitter is a social medium and people get twitterpated with it, we see and hear things like this: "Angus is completely twitterpated; he spends hours every day tweeting his friends."
Word History: 
Today's Good Word was first used in the Disney movie Bambi (1942). The verb to twitter originally meant "to chirp like a bird", an onomatopoeic creation. Later, since birds tend to get excited when they twitter, it came to mean "to tremble with excitement", as 'to be all in a twitter'. Pate is a word referring to the top of the head or skull, derived from the Latin patina "dish". It appears in such time-scarred combinations as addle-pated and bald-pated. This word comes from a suffixed form of PIE pete-/pote- "to spread". The same source is shared by pan and German Pfanne "pan". (So, now let's thank newcomer William Michael Reid for sharing today's odd Good Word with its unusually clear history.)
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