AURELIE FILIPPETTI, the French minister for culture, had to retract a tweet this week after making a glaring spelling mistake. As she is the official guardian of the French language, this was more than a bit embarrassing. Twitter’s spontaneity invites carelessness; and the minister duly blamed a sloppy aide. But for linguistic purists the incident touched on a far broader issue, concerning social media’s mangling of French and the accelerating invasion of franglais.

The French have long used rules to defend their language from the creeping advance of English, particularly in advertising. By law, any brand’s English slogan, such as Nespresso’s “What else?”, must be translated with a subtitle (Quoi d’autre?). This produces comical results. Quick, a fast-food chain popular across France, introduced le French burger to its menu, helpfully translating it as le burger à la française. Advertisers merrily twist the rules, using a tiny font for the translation, or inventing logos in indigestible franglais. Very irrésistible is a perfume by Givenchy, a French luxury brand. Fashion magazines liberally sprinkle their texts with references to le must, le look or le street style.

The spread of social media is battering French anew. As French is more prolix than English, Twitter’s limit of 140 characters per tweet creates an extra squeeze. French tweets, like mobile text messages, are filled with abbreviations: koi for quoi (what) or C for c’est (it is). Neologisms abound. Somebody who tweets can be followé by others. A French mobile-telephone operator has launched a service called “Sosh”, short for “social media”. Twitter has itself been transmuted from an English noun into a French verb. One official tweeted recently that “nous live-twitterons” a minister’s speech.

An official French body tries to fend off anglicisms with French alternatives. For cloud computing, it recommends informatique en nuage. A hashtag, used on Twitter with the symbol #, should be mot-dièse. In reality such gimmicks rarely catch on. Hooked on Twitter, but aghast at the mangling of French, Bernard Pivot, a 78-year-old literary critic and unofficial guardian of the language, has published a book of his own perfectly crafted tweets, all of which respect the language of Molière. Twitter need not corrupt the language, he argues; instead it imposes valuable reflection and concision. Indeed, as Mr Pivot points out, the first article of the 1789 Declaration of Human and Civic Rights contains 136 characters—the perfect length for a tweet.