Missing the Point

Wednesday May 23, 2012 at 1:18pm grammar, facebook, chain posting Comments (0) »

I'm not a Grammar Nazi.  Really.

I say "Me and Sheri" instead of "Sheri and I".  I spell things incorrectly.  I like sentence fragments. I misplace commas.  Passive voice is acceptable.  I occasionally use "their" as a singular possessive.  I don't generally get onto people for ending sentences with prepositons.  I'm ok with made-up words, false words and bad contractions ("ain't").  I am usually far more concerned with the effectiveness of the communication than whether the communication was somehow objectively correct.

But, seriously, misused homophones annoy the crap out of me.  I'm talking about Your/You're and its brethren.  I think it's because this is so basic.  This isn't even sentence construction, it's simple word choice.  I think I'm going to mentally substitude "wombat" for the offending word whenever I see this sort of thing.  Maybe that'll make it less irritating.

Really though, I think a large part of the irritation is due to the fact that I have a conditioned association between these errors and the emergent abbreviated text-speak that pervades our digital written media (u no wut i men?).  It seems to that said abbreviations are actually influencing the collective understanding of the English language.  I forsee a time when people will no longer know how to spell "you" and what is "correct" is constrained by character count.

There is a bit of a philosophical tangent here to the tune of "is this really a problem?".  One can argue that language is an ever-evolving construct, morphing over time in response to how it is most commonly used.  Bascially, however a languange can be effectively used is a "correct" implementation.

Yeah, ok.  I suppose theirs there's some truth to that.  Still, when commonly(?)-understood rules and definitions are bent to too far, communication is effected affected.  Sure, context clues can imply what you meant, but your you're putting cracks in the solidity of you're your message.  Also, quite often, the context is not as clear as the speaker may assume.

Also, I think there's something to be said for a certain eloquence.  A well-spoken oration or a well-written assertion has more impact than a poorly constructed phrasing that communicates the same idea (assuming it truly does so).

 

And this brings me to what started this whole train of thought: Facebook.

Yeah, I'm sure that's not surprising, but bear with me.  As you know, the BookFace is a bottomless well of examples of poor human expression on a number of levels, but this discourse is only concerned with the phenomenon known as "chain posting".

It should probably be noted that I don't re/chain post.  Ever.  I don't care how good your "cause" is or how important you think it is to "spread the word", I just don't do it.  There are a few reasons for this.  Mostly because I see it as a pointless exercise in psuedo-solidarity, but secondary reasons are that I view it as spam-like and that if I *never* do it, I can claim a sort of universal immunity, thereby hopefully avoiding the eventuality of making people mad when I decided not to post their messages but did post others.

But my favorite is coercion.  "If you don't repost this..." kinds of implications.  You're a bad person.  You don't care about dying people.  You don't "support our troops".  You "think you're too cool".  You're selfish.  The terrorists win.  You hate America.

Etc.

I particularly love it when the "implication" is something I don't particularly object to in the first place, but the poster seems to assume everyone reading it would be.  I.e., "If you don't repost this, you're not a real sports fan."  Really?  Well, crap.  I guess that means not a "real sports fan" then.  Bummer.

And, of course, my favorite aspect is when I get multiples of these, each from different perspectives, each vilifying the others.  And if I don't repost all of them, I'm going to hell.  Apparently my choices are to abstain or develop schizophrenia.

 

Now, lets bring this all together - what do you get?  You get a series of poorly worded, grammatically compromised, coercive chain posts each accusing me of being a terrible person because I'm not up in arms about today's vital issue.

Now, I may be missing the point, but even if I completely agree with your cause and I want to engage in the proselytization thereof and I could get past the coerciveness and I was enough of a jerk to want to attempt to coerce all of my friends into reposting this critically important Facebook status, I STILL wouldn't repost your message because I can't just get past the 5 grammatical errors in the original post.  And here I go back to my comment on eloquence - if you're going to make a point, make it well.  You're giving me the impression that this "universal truth" was put together by a 3rd-grader in 15 minutes.  I'm sorry, I just can't take you seriously.

 

~PS