Tila Tequila’s latest unwillingness to acknowledge the universe’s “Please: stop.” advice has yet again resulted in a stream of Tweets serving as irrefutable evidence that she needs professional help. At the very least, it’s disconcerting. People tend to do this!

This obviously isn’t Tila’s first Twitter-related breakdown. She’s done this kind of thing before, and not just in the wake of Casey Johnson’s death. She also announced a surrogate pregnancy that turned out to be false. And when NFL star Shawne Merriman was cleared of all charges regarding a domestic dispute spat between himself and Tila Tequila, Tila took to Twitter. And it was ugly.

So was that time author Alice Hoffman took to Twitter to trash a critic who didn’t like her book (which she later apologized for). Then there was the time Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley freaked out after Obama announced his plan for health care, exposing Grassley as a raging, borderline-illiterate politico. But one with a Twitter feed! There was Diddy having to explain that he was (and then wasn’t) married. There’s Lil Bow Wow using Twitter to confess how drunk he was when he drove on New Year’s Eve. And then there’s Lydia Hearst’s fight with Twitter masses, too. OH. We can’t forget the way Perez Hilton took to Twitter to let his urgent state of affairs be known to the world after being suckerpunched by Will I. Am.

Twitter’s an incredible technology with so much potential to change the world, supposedly! And it’s definitely a great way to cull information of all stripes. But it’s also given us a great vantage point to watch the emotional collapse of everyone, especially celebrities, especially when they decide that 140 characters just isn’t enough to describe the way they’re feeling. And it always looks the same, as they

1. Fire off multiple Tweets
2. In rapid succession
3. That get progressively more unhinged
4. And contain either uncomfortably revealing and/or incriminating information.

The ultimate confirmation that you’ve witnessed a Twitter Freakout: when a Tweet is sent out acknowledging the previous faux-paux: see Bow Wow, Little and Hoffman, Alice. Or when a Twitter account is shut down. Now that this has inevitably become a “Thing,” we obviously need a name for it, because “Twitter Freakout” doesn’t quite do it justice. All of Twitter is a freakout, right? But a

Tweetdown,
Tweakdown,
Tweakout,
or a Tweetout

sure all have nice rings to them, right? Vote for your favorite in the comments, and together, we’ll shepherd into culture this easy way to describe the ultimate digital ‘awkward turtle’ of our times, when I post the winner at 6PM. Other suggestions are welcome. Also, let’s all agree. Take your hands off of your laptop, raise one of them, and say outloud:

I swear on penalty of isolating myself from the people around me by making them intensely uncomfortable and scared of me, the next time we have an emergency of the emotional stripe, we will stay the fuck off the internet. And let celebrities do that for us.

Don’t you feel better?

Update: We clearly have a winner. Twitter + Freakout = Tweakout. And thus,

The Tweakout it is.

View full post on Gawker: valleywag