Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy is trying his hand at being a twit.

After revving up a new Twitter account—@Courtland51—on Friday, it didn’t take him long to get going. As of Tuesday afternoon, he’d racked up 43 tweets, was following 138 fellow users, and had collected 255 followers.

But Milloy isn’t sure he likes it. Asked what he thinks about his experience via email, he’s bitingly impish:

Well, to be frank, I still cant get past the name of the thing—-no matter how it’s conjugated: i tweet, he twit, she got twitter twat…i see stuff like that scrawling along my “twitter feed” and I start feeling like CIA trying to break spy code. But I’ll be damned if I let those millennials think I cant keep up.

The scribe once associated the time-sucking tool with D.C. gentrifiers instead of spies, inspiring him to famously dub the social media platform’s local devotees “myopic little twits.”

But complete about-faces be darned, after taking a mandatory social media class at the Post, Milloy announced he was planning on becoming a twit himself. He wanted to confront gentrifiers on their own turf, he said. The “myopic eyeballs that have been twittered shut to the real world will be pried open so wide they’ll need new facebooks,” he declared.

Milloy is sort of on mission, tweeting out at least one myopic-twit-baiting missive: ”seriously, the main reason im on twitter is to track millennials & find out if they do anything in dc other than party and gentrify.” But for the most part, like most those of us who use Twitter, he spends time trolling for followers (“i need a follower. what if i call myself moses?,” he asked) and being clever (“so im new to twittin right? and i got these questions, like: if i follow everybody who follows me, do we go in circles? just wonderin.'”)

Though he’s one of the city’s most ornery figures, I’m predicting that what will be most interesting about Milloy’s Twitter feed won’t be Milloy. When he’s written his most controversial words about race and class in the District, the comments have piled up below the online version of his column. With Milloy on Twitter any future venting will likely migrate there, where the writer and his critics can work things out 140 characters at a time.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery