CNN star Larry King has 1.4 million Twitter followers, which makes him a Twitter star as well.

But get this: He’s 775 tweets into his Twitter career, and only now has Larry learned what the “fail whale” is. Here he is from earlier this afternoon:

I’ve been educated on the “fail whale” — thanks for all your answers.

It doesn’t end there, though. Larry wants to make sure his dedicated followers also understand this complicated and obscure Twitter symbol. A bit later (after wishing happy birthdays to “@MrsKutcher Leonardo DiCaprio, Calista Flockhart, Barbara Boxer, & Stanley Tucci!”) he tweets:

It’s a visual metaphor, “Fail Whale” = too many people on the servers. Birds trying to carry a whale = too much info so Twitter can’t fly

It’s almost poetic.

Tomorrow Larry explains what the word “tweeting” means, using a Venn diagram and haiku.

(Thanks to my colleague, TVNewser editor Kevin Allocca, for passing along this gem.)