It has become so unlikely, almost to the extent of impossibility, to find a tweet without the boastful # sign dumped in
It has become so unlikely, almost to the extent of impossibility, to find a tweet without the boastful # sign dumped inWiki Commons

2013 has been a 'hashtag (#)' year.

It's no longer a number sign or a pound sign. Its new avatar, under the name 'hashtag', has been so overused in micro-blogging site Twitter that a Michigan University has branded the term as the second most annoying word of the year after 'selfie'.

It has become so unlikely, almost to the extent of impossibility, to find a tweet without the boastful '#' sign attached to it; irrespective of whether or not it conveyed any meaning. The sign, more interestingly, has jumped in at all kinds of places. Television, billboards, knitted sweaters, shirts and more; places are hard to find where hashtag has not made its appalling presence.

Thanks to this time of the year, the micro-blogging site has been flooded with the way of wishing Happy New Year in a rather unconventional way. The three words always come accompanied with the dreaded hashtags; a trend that has almost become a pain to everyone who is looking for a meaning in the post.

"It's taken on this strange cultural icon position," Christ Messina, a Twitter user from California, credited with launching the social-media hashtag in a tweet back in 2007, told the Business Mirror. "I just kind of sit back in awe and love the way this idea has taken off."

But not everyone would love it. Not at least when everything that is contained within the tweet or every little word in a post has been plastered by the undesirable hashtag.

How would you feel if someone wrote something like this? #ready #for #the #new # year #party #waiting #for #it....

The primary objective of creating the hastag was to let the post be visible to a larger group of people who were talking about the same subject. Words or phrases that contain # as their prefixes turn into hyperlinks connecting that post to many other people with the same hastag.

But people somehow seem to have forgotten the art of being sensible in its use. Why would you hastag an auxiliary verb like #am, #is, #can #do etc? Or what purpose does it hold to put the sign before an article like, #a, #the, #an. Which larger discussion would you possibly want your comment be connected to? Who would be discussing about #is or #the? What meaning does it convey?

If this article was written by an avid Twitter user with the habit of dumping in # everywhere he likes, he would probably say: #How #can #people #be #so #stupid #to #hastag #every #word #in #happy #new #year #?

Below are some of the Happy New Year tweets in the hastag style: