A young person I know recently said something along the lines that Twitter was going down the drain. I don’t where that idea came from. I’ve been using Twitter since Sept. 19, 2008. (which is longer than 99.755% of all other Twitter users, according to http://twopcharts.com/howlongontwitter).

Perhaps the young person was thinking of sponsored contents like the ad here from the Alliance for Quality Education of New York. I ignore most Twitter ads but this one got me because of the words “ET HE UGLY RUTH.”

In my mind, I read “et” as “and” in French, but that didn’t make rest of it make any sense. I thought of “Et tu Brutus.” That didn’t help. “He ugly,” though, that seemed to make sense, even though the verb of being is dropped. So someone is saying “(Something) He is ugly.” OK. Then what about “Ruth.”

At first, I thought maybe someone was telling “Ruth” that “he ugly.” But there is no comma after “ugly” to indicate the phrase is being addressed to Ruth. Instead, we get “Ugly Ruth.” So does that mean someone is saying Ruth is ugly? Who is Ruth anyway, considering I’m looking at an image of Governor Andrew Cuomo?

So I read all four words again, and wondered if there was some sort of lisp action happening in the first two lines to make them read “ethe,” as in “is he.” So then does that make the sentence “Is he ugly Ruth,” which makes me think they’re asking Ruth if she thinks the governor is ugly.

Of course, it could mean that letters were dropped off to make people want to click on the image so they can see all the letters. I didn’t do that. I assume it could’ve said “Get the ugly truth.” But why would an organization that has paid good money to promote their ideas on Twitter want to bumf it up like that by only showing a few of the letters of words? That wouldn’t make any sense.

So is he ugly, Ruth? Well, is he?