In the land of technology, like any other foreign country, it helps to know the language.

Social mediaites (social mediarians?), particularly have their own tongue, so here are some tips in case you find yourself at a tweet-up (defined later).

To publish a comment on Twitter is to "tweet." Don't ever say you twittered; people will think you are a twit. To "retweet" an item is to republish it on your Twitter account so your followers can see it.

If you subscribe to someone's Twitter postings you "follow" them.

Sometimes a person on Twitter will arrange a physical meeting with his followers by posting the time and place of the gathering on Twitter. This is called a "tweet-up."

The totality of users on Twitter is the "Twitterverse." When Twitter is having technical problems, the Twitterverse will see a cartoon of a whale being held up by a flock of birds. This is called the "fail whale."

A "hash tag" is a word or phrase in a tweet preceded by the # symbol. Searching on the hash tag allows you to see everything tweeted on that subject.

Facebook also has some specialized terms. If you want to add someone's postings to your home page and let them see your postings, you "friend" them. If you want to stop the relationship, you "unfriend" them. A person has to approve becoming your friend, unlike Twitter in which you can follow most people without their permission.

You can also "like" a Facebook post, which makes the post available to all your friends and shows them you liked it. Liking is fairly new. It used to be called "become a fan."

If you want to add a comment to someone's Facebook information, you write on their "wall." Your wall is part of your "profile page," which contains information about you that you choose to provide.

A new feature of many social sites (Facebook is about to add it) is "geotagging." Geotagging exploits modern phones' ability to attach the location of a sender to a message, either on a map or by latitude and longitude. Photos also can be geotagged so there is a record of where they were taken.

If you are promiscuous with your location and transmit it for all the world to see, you are a "geoexhibitionist."

And of course, there are some places you might not want to send a geotagged message from, e.g. prison, a bar during working hours, your secret girlfriend's house. Also, if you post a picture of your new car in front of your house and that picture is tagged, you've shown everyone where you live.

"Geocaching" is a game in which a stash of items is hidden and the geolocation is published. People look for these items and when they find them can add something or take something to prove they have found them. If you are a geocacher who becomes inactive, you have committed "geocide." Loads of geek fun.

"Photobombing" is a game in which you run through the background of a group being photographed and make a face in order to spoil the picture. Kids like to do this in tourist locations.

In another variation, when a photobomb is discovered, you can use Photoshop to replace everyone else's face in the photo with the funny face in the background. Why? Because you can.

Photobombing is different from "Google bombing," the practice of misdirecting search returns for humorous, political or other purposes. For a while in February, if you searched on "Where can you find Chuck Norris" and hit the I'm Feeling Lucky button, you were directed to a page that said, "Google won't search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you." Try it. It still works.

And finally there is Pi Time, when the digital clock is at 3.14 (based on the numerical value of the mathematical symbol Pi). Some people also use Pi Time as an excuse to eat pie.

So the next time you are at a gathering of the digerati and the social medians, throw out a sentence like this. "Oh, btw, I was photobombed and I was so mad I posted it for all my Facebook friends and then tweeted about it and a lot of people liked it and retweeted."

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