Okay, I’ve never used twitter and am kinda stupid about this. I would think that one’s twitter “handle” is one’s chosen name on twitter, and where that diverges (which it does not do in many cases) from the “@certainwordshere” bit needed to direct your tweet to a particular destination, there would be another word – address? – for the collection of traffic-directing characters. Yet I hear people use “handle” seemingly to mean both the name used and the collection of traffic-directing characters and wonder if I am missing something; is one the handle and the other not? Even my google-fu failed at the task of finding the a single, identifiably-correct term be for the one that is not a “handle”?

So I’m crowdsourcing this one: what is one to call the “name” on one’s twitter account (especially when it is an obvious pseudonym) and what is one to call the traffic-directing characters?

I’d tend to say “twitter handle” and “twitter address” but I am afraid I might be very, very wrong in this and would like my readership to actually understand whatever the hell it is I’m trying to say. That’s not guaranteed just because I get twitter terms right, but after this maybe I can learn how to create individual sentences of less than twenty words each.