The Case of the First Evergreen Tweet

I try to write mostly evergreen content here. But not all writing is intended to stick around, and some platforms are particularly well suited for ephemeral musings. I’m thinking especially of Twitter, with its firehose of quips that you may miss if you don’t happen to see them when they’re posted.

And yet, on Twitter, there has emerged a trope of the “evergreen tweet.”

This is a tweet that, intentionally or not, seems like it will always be true. The phrase “evergreen tweet” might be used in response to something that wasn’t intended that way, as a little joke. So someone might tweet something like, “Wow, the Mets really suck tonight” to which a Phillies fan might respond, “Evergreen tweet.” Ha ha funny.

I started wondering: What was the very first evergreen tweet, and does it really hold up today? Let’s investigate.

I used Twitter’s Advanced Search to find uses of the phrase “evergreen tweet” going back to Twitter’s launch in 2006. The earliest instance I found was from April, 2008. A user named @sondrasondra had only been on Twitter for a month before writing:

So what was @sondrasondra responding to that was so evergreen?

We may never know. Apparently it wasn’t so evergreen after all. User @cdaclan appears to have deleted it.

But wait a minute. The person who uses the twitter handle @cdaclan only joined Twitter in 2011. So they couldn’t have been the person who wrote the first evergreen tweet. Whoever had the @cdaclan account in 2008 must have changed their name or deleted the account, making the handle available again. Who could the original @cdaclan have been? If I can find that account, maybe I can find whatever they wrote on April 9, 2008.

@sondrasondra currently follows more than 4,000 people. But @cdaclan must have been someone she was following in her first month, since that’s when she made the tweet. Since Twitter lists the people you follow in reverse chronological order, maybe if I go to the very bottom of her twitter feed, I can figure out who she was following early on that might have changed their name from @cdaclan to something else.

Be right back. [scroll scroll scroll]

Okay, I scrolled down to the bottom of her follow list. @sondrasondra started out following Biz Stone, Barack Obama, tech guys Leo Laporte and Robert Scoble, and other notable early tweeters. These were likely people that Twitter suggested to new users. I don’t think any of these people were ever @cdaclan. What could @cdaclan even mean? CDA Clan? Maybe the person is a member of the California Dental Association? Or maybe they live in Coeur d’Alene? Maybe their name is C. Daclan?

Maybe Twitter Search can help me again. Be right back.

Okay, I just searched through all mentions of @cdaclan on Twitter around mid-2008. They taper off after that, which must be when @cdaclan stopped using Twitter or that handle. But I found another clue:

Cecilia! Her name is Cecilia! And she has a follower named Susan who goes by @scubasue! Looking back at @sondrasondra’s follow list, I see that @scubasue was the 11th person @sondrasondra followed on Twitter. So maybe she followed @cdaclan at around the same time. That further narrows down where I should look among her 4,000 follows.

Unfortunately, looking at people @sondrasondra followed around then, I see nobody with a name even similar to Cecilia.

But searching @scubasue’s tweets for other mentions of “Cecilia,” I see that she calls someone else Cecilia: a user named @cd_lbc.

Unless @scubasue knows two Cecilias, that must be what @cdaclan changed her username to. And I can see from search results that @scubasue, @cd_lbc and @sondrasondra all tweet at each other, so they must be a group of friends. Maybe they all even work together:

You with me so far?

More evidence: The first name of the person with the @cd_lbc account is Cecilia! Unfortunately, the current user with that account only joined in 2015, and the account is not very active. It definitely doesn’t have history going back to 2008. But this must be the Cecilia who wrote the first evergreen tweet, right?

You know what? I’m just going to reach out to @sondrasondra and see what she can tell me. She appears to still be active on Twitter. Maybe she remembers what she was replying to that seemed so evergreen at the time on a random day in 2008.

I’ll let you know if I hear back from her.

But does “evergreen” count?

Now that I think about it, @sondrasondra’s use of quotation marks around “evergreen” may hint that she was making some sort of pun. Maybe the original tweet was about a conifer tree. So does it even count, if she wasn’t using the phrase as a punchline the way it’s used today?

Let’s see how far we have to go to find someone using it the way we do now.

In October, 2008, a user named @MensHumidor wrote:

Okay, we’re getting closer. This person is definitely using it the way we do now, but he’s commenting on his own tweet, so it’s not quite the same. Who is the first person to use it in response to someone else’s tweet that wasn’t intended to be funny?

For that, we have to skip 2009 and go all the way to April, 2010, when @jeremymeyers became the first person to call someone else’s tweet evergreen the way we do today:

So there you have it. “CSI Miami was poorly written this week.” That’s the first evergreen tweet. Of course, it’s not truly evergreen because the show isn’t even on the air anymore. And it couldn’t have been true then because CSI: Miami was always awesome.

And that’s no matter of a pinyon.1

And that’s it for another newsletter. Obviously, this edition of the newsletter will stand the test of time equally as well as that first evergreen tweet.

Of course, all of the above research may be inaccurate if whoever tweeted the true first use of “evergreen tweet” has deleted it or closed their account, or blocked me on Twitter. Then it wouldn’t show up in my search results. But it would be preserved at the Library of Congress, which has an archive of every public tweet from 2006 - 2017. So some future scholar can do some research and determine more definitively what the first evergreen tweet truly was, or confirm that it was in fact this one about CSI: Miami. History will want to know.

See you next time!

David