Twitter, the preferred social network of journalists, pundits, political junkies, and pretty much no one else, has become increasingly relevant in the Trump era. With the president himself using Twitter as a platform for his deranged rantings and questionably accidental retweets , voracious users of the social network have found their voices elevated to issues of minor national importance in these confusing times. During the election, for example, Donald Trump appeared to reference a joke from the beautifully trollish @randygdub as evidence of voter fraud while delivering a speech at a rally in Colorado.

Raandy is part of "Weird Twitter," a hard-to-define niche of weirdos and jokesters, once described as the part of the social network "where the language of Twitter gets created, where its funniest jokes come from, and where its worst tendencies are isolated, rebroadcast, and sometimes destroyed."

Since the election—which, naturally, was predicted by one of their own in 2011—the tone of Weird Twitter has become increasingly political. Considering how many of its members happen to also be outspoken leftists, this isn't surprising, but it's been a strange thing to watch the online left and the descendants of the Something Awful boards merge into a unified movement.

Twitter gets a lot of (well-deserved) flack, but the essential beauty of social network is how it fosters conversation between journalists, the DC elite, other marginally influential people and total randos. Whether we like it or not, petty political spats of increasing importance are playing out on Twitter every day. Unfortunately, a lot of these arguments rely so much on slang, memes, and in-jokes that they're incomprehensible to outsiders.

So if you don't understand what the rose emoji signifies or why people with those things hate people with donut emojis—which is a real thing—don't worry, I got your back. Here's a primer for all the n00bz and to my Twitter friends, I'm sorry for ruining all of your jokes:

"Brocialist"**:** a derogatory term for a male socialist who doesn't respect women. Also known as a Bernie bro or simply, a "dudebro," "brocialist" is frequently used by pro-Hillary Clinton centrists on Twitter to disparage their Bernie Sanders–loving leftist adversaries.

"The dirtbag left": A term coined by Amber A'Lee Frost of Chapo Trap House, a popular politics podcast that was once described by the Guardian as "leftwing Breitbart," "the dirtbag left" describes a political movement that champions socialist ideology with an aggressive disinterest in pandering to prominent liberals (any Hillary Clinton advocate, for example). Dirtbag leftists disdain the average liberal's commitment to pomp and circumstance, to upholding civilized discourse. Moreover, the dirtbag left believes vulgarity can be a powerful political tool. (In an essay on the necessity of political vulgarity for Current Affairs, Frost writes that in the Trump era, "If we do not embrace the profane now and again, we will find ourselves handicapped by our own civility.")