And that is the law as laid down by the Grey Lady's standards editor, Phil Corbett.

In a leaked memo obtained by theawl.com, Mr Corbett sets out his reasons for not using the moniker that has become accepted parlance in many a geek's every day chatter:

"Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles."
 
"Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And 'tweet' - as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter - is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections."
 
"Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords."

Interestingly enough, Mr Corbett also notes that while the word is bandied about by the technically savvy crowd of the day, who knows how long it will be around for.

"Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'e-mail'. Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and 'tweet' may fade into oblivion," said Mr Corbett.

Truth be told, Mr Corbett is just not a big fan of the actual word itself.

"Of course, it doesn't help that the word itself seems so inherently silly," he wrote.

So what does Twitter have to say about the whole affair. Here is their official response, posted on Twitter natch from their head PR guy, Sean Garrett:

The link takes you to an article by Neiman Labs that looks at the 50 words that New York Times readers looked up the most. Count how many Twitter used in its reply.

Meanwhile reaction on Twitter to the whole Tweet ban gives food for thought.

@RonSupportsYou Is this NY Times decision crazy?

@AndyStettler Another "titan" thinks he can control the crowd?

There is some support for the move.

@natalidelconte: I gotta say, I support this. I hate that word.

@eric_andersen tweet is "a bit too cutesy?" I'm w/NYT, tweet is "inherently silly"

What do you think? Is it silly? Should it be banned? And what would you replace it with?

"With annotations, Twitter could become a platform for sharing anything, not just 140 characters of text. Perhaps new apps will allow users to share media like photos, videos and music? Or they'll add more details about a tweeted link? Will you tag your tweets? Share vCards? Create polls? "These sorts of innovations will launch shortly and we expect to be surprised and delighted by what the developers come up with. At some point, the map of a tweet posted by Krikorian will resemble a primitive artefact from a bygone era."

If you’re not a Twitter user, it is an Internet-based version of SMS or Text Messages that you send from your mobile/cell phone. These text messages, or “Tweets”, are limited to 140 characters just the same way that SMS text messages are. The difference is that they are sent out into the Twitter Universe (Twitterverse or Twittersphere). Anyone who “follows” you will receive your tweets. So for example, if 6 people follow my Twitter account, then those 6 people will see every Tweet that I send.

Yes, you’re right in thinking that it’s another one of those “Social Networking” things that are currently all the rage.  But it can be a whole lot more than that, too.  It can be a valuable marketing tool if used correctly.

Imagine that you had not 6, but 6,000 followers.  Now if you’re an online marketer, and you send a Tweet referring to a new product that you’re selling, you’re putting your message in front of 6,000 people.  Let’s assume that your product sells for $27 and just 1% of those 6,000 people respond and buy it.  That’s a cool $1,620 just from one Tweet.  Scale that up to a higher price or more followers and you’ll see the potential.

I recently witnessed the owner of a sales website tweeting his 180,000 followers.  Within seconds, his sales site had exceeded its number of users, so to anyone else, it appeared to have crashed.  That is incredible marketing power.

So as a Twitter user, how do you get a large number of followers?  You simply sign up at TweeterGetter. It’s a remarkably quick and simple way of increasing your number of Twitter followers.

Before I signed up, I had 6 followers.  After one day, I had 13 followers.  After 2 days I had 34 followers.  At time of writing it’s still less than 3 days and I already have 118 followers, so you can see how the system works to exponentially increase your number of followers.  How many will it be after 1 week? 1 month?

The system is viral down 6 levels, so as more people sign up under you, the bigger the increase in your followers.  I have hardly even promoted this system and already seen these incredible results.