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Reader question: Please explain “throw me a bone” in the following: “Can you throw me a bone from time to time and answer my tweets?” My comments: Here it means “have mercy”. Seriously, this twitter or tweeter – or whoever he is called, the person who tweets – is merely begging for the other tweeter, the person whom he tweets to, to return his tweets. Or to tweet back. I guess this is a correct expression, but I am not sure. You see, I have a Weibo account but am practically a non-tweeter. I seldom log on, having swiftly found out that tweeting is twice time-wasting than instant messaging and perhaps ten times more time consuming than email. However, I can empathize with this generation of tweeters – they use email, they are on QQ (a Chinese equivalent of, say, MSN messenger), they tweet, they blog and they are virtually online 24 hours a day, seven days a weak (week, pardon the slip but many of these young always-online folks do appear frail, pale and weak week in and week out) and yet they are lonely. They participate on online forums and let rip their anger at authorities at various levels for making a mess of the environment or football or anything that doesn’t really matter and yet they’re quite friendless. They stare into cyberspace and talk incessantly without bothering if anyone talks back to them. At any rate, they don’t seem to have enough real people to really communicate with, people in flesh and with blood, whom they can trust, count on and fall back on. As is confirmed by many polls, today’s people are LinkedIn but not linked. Real friends seem to be fewer to hang out with than before. | 
