Hurrah! I am clearly not alone in my loathing of Twitter. It seems to me thoroughly corrosive, of both journalism and public debate more broadly. But we cannot now uninvent it, so a way must be found to turn people away from it, and steer them towards a more elevated form of social network communication.

Three cheers, then, for Twitsum Twatsum, a new platform launched yesterday. This allows users to couch their every banal waking thought in the form of lengthy disquisitions in Latin, peppered with classical quotations and abstruse scholarly bagatelles. The minimum length of a so-called “Tweetum” is ten thousand words, and if a user attempts to insert one of those wretched “emoticon” horrors, the software is designed to cause their device (phone, tablet, etc.) to explode with a loud bang!, shattering it to smithereens.

I feel sure that millions around the world, who are currently destroying what is left of our civilisation by their endless Twittering, will embrace this splendid new service. I have already posted my first Tweetum, a crushingly tedious comment on what I had for breakfast made uncrushingly untedious by dint of its inordinate length, finely-wrought Latin prose, and quotations from Catullus.