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Wednesday, November 27, 2019

In Other Words: You're Posting Wrong

It is November 27th 2019, and I've re-activated Facebook after one full calendar year. To the day. Know what I've noticed? It's still a mess. Having said that, I've missed almost everyone. I wish the platform hadn't gotten so revolting. It seems there could have been a sustainable business model that didn't require vanquishing the very soul of the nation, but Zuckerberg gonna Suckerdrag. Truth is I'm better without the bitch, so I'm only back briefly. I'm giving myself six weeks to gather contact info for Friends I want to keep in touch with, and then I am deleting Facebook. But while I'm here...

Among the lesser trials of having Facebook in one's life is watching in real time the devolution of written communication. Can you believe how lazy everyone's getting about...well, words? People out here subbing out words for other words that aren't the right words...and worse, making up new meanings. I saw someone say something is "timely" and only through careful consideration of her post did I realize she meant "time sensitive." Girl. You don't want to mix those up. People using words and expressions they don't understand gets me right in the gonads. You guys, can we be more sure about what we're saying?

"Hear, hear!"

Don't type "Here! Here!"  "Hear, hear!" is the missive you're looking for when in strong agreement with a Friend's post. "Here, here!" doesn't make any sense. You can look it up or you can trust me, I'm a writer. To wit: "Everyone deserves clean air, water, affordable nutrition and health care as a human right."
"Hear, hear!"

For all intents and purposes 

This speaky-speak qualifier is what I call "junk" and as editor I'd cross it out hard. But if you're gonna use it, at least use IT, not its muddy inbred cousin "for all intensive purposes." For all intents and purposes, the clause modifies the content of whatever you just said, presupposing every possible intent and purpose. Don't say "for all intensive purposes." What would that even be.

All of a sudden

The first person I ever heard say "all of the sudden" was my then-future husband Joe, but I have since heard it from other people. Not a lot of people. But enough to show me it wasn't a Joe-only thing or a New Jersey (where he's from) thing. I don't know if "All of the sudden" is grammatically incorrect, it just sounds weird, doesn't it? The sudden what. Implies there's only one "sudden."

By accident

I theorize as follows: people who say something happened "on accident" do so because they're using a certain prepositional logic: because we say "on purpose" when we purposely cause an event, surely  it's "on accident" when we blunderbuss our way to disaster. Dude, no. It's "by accident" and "on purpose."

 

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1 comments:

Brenda said...

Thank you. Very well written. I often fall victim to autocorrect misinterpretation. I hit the post button and glance back to discover my post has been hijacked and no longer reflects what I typed. While often humorous, I wind up looking foolish.