The following Tweet from esteemed baseball writer Peter Gammons might be the greatest tweet ever tweeted in the history of Twitter.
67pgammo Peter Gammons .ladamad Anna v v V V V V v v v V V V V V V v nv In buns ee V Petty’s Freefallin’…
Let’s break down this tweet, shall we?
.ladamad — spelled backwards it becomes damadal, which could be a reference to a dalmation, a spotted dog known to be quite cute and friendly. Anna, the name of a young lass, occasionally mentioned in love and other songs. A string of V’s — this is the most puzzling part of the tweet, especially given the varying capitalization of the letters. Could these be flowers? Or perhaps a wave? Or perhaps something completely different, I really can’t tell. In buns — cinnamon buns, or perhaps a reference to a particularly appealing part of Anna’s anatomy? No context is given and thus the follower is left in a glass case of emotion, to quote the immortal Ron Burgundy.
The tweet ends with a reference to Tom Petty’s classic song Freefallin’…perhaps this was the song that Anna was listening to as she took her dalmation through a field of flowers (or for a run along a beach with waves crashing along the shore) after eating a particularly delicious cinnamon bun? Entirely possible but then again, I’m not a Hall-of-Fame sportswriter, just some guy in a Starbucks attempting to make sense of a tweet that is clearly above my level of comprehension.
The burning question at hand — put together, what does the above string of characters mean? Is Mr. Gammons attempting to convey an important nugget of baseball wisdom to his 95,000+ followers? Was he just really excited about a song that came on his Pandora station? Was he in some sort of trouble? It’s much too put together to be a simple pocket tweet, as we have all done before. No, this tweet clearly has some sort of meaning even if we can’t discern it at first (or even twelfth) blush.
The world needs to know whether this is a solution to the problems plaguing erratic Red Sox ace John Lackey, a secretly coded message to the legions of Tom Petty fans that (I’m assuming) are also Peter Gammons fans, a love letter to a girl named Anna…the possibilities are endless without context. Centuries from now, anthropologists studying social media’s impact on the English language in the 21st century will find themselves parsing this particular tweet for some kind of meaning, in much the same way we all are right now. Break out your secret decoder rings everyone, see if there’s any way you can figure out the meaning of this particular tweet and feel free to post your own interpretation in the comments below.
For what it’s worth, Gammons, in addition to being one of the best baseball writers ever, is also a consistently entertaining tweeter as well. You can follow him @pgammo.
