Totally #awesome

One of our Sharon friends sent me the following message:

A month ago we received a thank you note from Eliana for a gift card we gave her on the occasion of her becoming a Bat Mitzvah.  Her note said,

"Thanks for the gift!!  I will spend it on #awesome things!!”

Imagine that...#awesome things!!  I thought that was really cute and a real sign of the times.

We hope Purim is festive and brings light to you and your #awesome family!

I have to admit that I see and hear the term “hashtag” bantered about all the time but I have no earthly idea what it means. So I turned to Wikipedia and found this:

A hashtag is a type of metadata tag used on social networks such as Twitter and other microblogging services, allowing users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging that makes it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content; it allows easy, informal markup of folk taxonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language.

Users create and use hashtags by placing the number sign or pound sign # (also known as the hash character) in front of a string of alphanumeric characters, usually a word or unspaced phrase, in or at the end of a message. The hashtag may contain letters, digits, and underscores.^[1] Searching for that hashtag will yield each message that has been tagged with it. A hashtag archive is consequently collected into a single stream under the same hashtag.^[2] For example, on the photo-sharing service Instagram, the hashtag #bluesky allows users to find all the posts that have been tagged using that hashtag.

Because of its widespread use, hashtag was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014.^[3][4] The term hashtag can also refer to the hash symbol itself when used in the context of a hashtag.^[5]

Here is a somewhat simpler explanation:

On social media sites such as Twitter, a hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) and used to identify messages on a specific topic. For example,

"spammers often broadcast tweets with popular hashtags even if the tweet has nothing to do with them."

I found a list of words that can be used in place of “awesome”:

1. Outstanding 2. Astounding 3. Staggering 4. Kryptonian* 5. Breathtaking 6. Stunning 7. Prodigious 8. Stupendous 9. Righteous 10. Wicked 11. Superb 12. Sublime 13. Indomitable

14. Transcendent 15. Marvelous 16. Resplendent 17. Phenomenal 18. Remarkable 19. Funkadelic* 20. Magnificent 21. Virtuosic 22. Rapturous 23. Flawless 24. Majestic 25. Splendiferous 26. Legendary

Many of these words could be used to describe Eliana, but now I can see why she seems to love the word “awesome”!

Eliana, if you are reading this, YOU ARE #AWESOME!

Love,

Rebecca

p.s. A bit more awesomeness: As of today, this blog has 55,481 page views. Just 74 more will get us to 55,555! Keep on clicking!