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2.11.2009

grievance: facebook statuses' grammar

I am shocked to my very core that Facebook actually took down the "is" as part of its status template and now leaves it there for optional use.

By what I am even more shocked is that despite this, people continually use it... and use it WRONG. And what I mean by this is the statuses' predication upon a particular kind of sentence format, namely a person speaking about him or herself in the third person.

Now I'm not knocking people who outwardly go against this sentence structure by either eliminating the "is" after their names or writing something after the "is" which is clearly supposed to go against the structure, like a song lyric or simply a noun, e.g. "Jenn DOUGHNUTS!" or "Jenn is Barack Obama is the shit." I am okay with this kind of erratic grammar solely because it is purposely crafted to be so.

My problem is with people who are too dumb to realize that when they start a sentence about themselves in the third person, they must continue to do so throughout the sentence. The following hypothetical statuses do NOT make sense:

"Jenn is so tired I think I'm going to take a bubble bath and go to bed."
Should be: "Jenn is so tired she thinks she's going to take a bubble bath and go to bed."
"Jenn is studying for a PoliSci exam. OMG I'm soooo gonna fail."
Should be: "Jenn is studying for a PoliSci exam and is sooo gonna fail."

I'm assuming that this makes sense and needs not more examples. All I'm saying is that it's ABOVE infuriating to see this kind of crap on my status update page because it is a blatant offense on the structure of modern English. I understand that my rules for speaking are far more stringent than those for others... but casualisms and slangitudes are really what deteriorate language... and our language already sounds like untrained colloquial drivel.

I'm all about technology, but before Facebook... at least people could maintain the same pronoun and subsequent verb form. At least 'til the next SENTENCE began! Pish posh.

-moon

2 comments:

  1. Jenn is spending far too much time on Facebook and wasting even MORE time critiquing silliness on Facebook.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not only do I agree with the above comment, but prescriptive grammar is more of a pre-September 11 concern. It's a new world and we should just let me gerunds be gerunds. Perfect grammar would have killed most of our great writers.

    ReplyDelete