Oh Myyy! (8 page)

Within minutes of the post, the name-calling police were on the scene with acceptability filters armed and ready, reminding me (as if I needed it) that calling people “assholes” because, well, they are acting like assholes, isn’t going to accomplish anything or change any minds.

I beg to differ. Nobody likes to be thought of as an asshole, any more than anyone likes being thought of as a douche or a monster or a dickwad. So pointing out that people who think of themselves as
homophobes are in fact acting like assholes has a decent shot of having some effect.

More importantly, the tweet was funny. Come on, it’s funny. It’s surprising, concise and dead-on true. That’s why it resonates, and why so many people shared it, including me. It said what so many have wanted to say but never quite had the right vocabulary to articulate. As with the douchebags of the world, calling an asshole an asshole sometimes is exactly what needs to happen.

Indeed, it’s even funnier that Morgan Freeman tweeted it, because you can’t help but hear it in his voice.

When it comes to the proper place of humor, I do have one caveat. There is a time for us to laugh together, and a time when it simply is just “too soon.” Jon Stewart famously delayed further airings of
The Daily Show
for over a week after the events of 9/11. And my friend Gilbert Gotfread really ought to have delayed, perhaps permanently, his barrage of tsunami and dead Japanese jokes that came on the heels of that terrible tragedy.

Even science fiction fans have reminded me that some wounds are simply too fresh, as with my repost of what Alderaan looks like now, which elicited many condemnations of “too soon.”

As the old saying goes, I was simply looking for fan love, in Alderaan places.

The notion that something is “too soon” has bitten me in the proverbial ass before. For example, a fan sent me a picture of a capsized cruise liner with a smiling “Isaac the Bartender” giving the thumbs up. Not knowing that rescue operations had failed to recover certain passengers, I reposted the picture. I learned with dismay — minutes later from many fans — that families were still in shock and grief over their missing loved ones. I was mortified. I immediately took down the post and issued an apology for the ill-conceived share. This is one of the dangers of the Internet: it is far too easy to post or pass along something that is frankly just in terrible taste.

Which brings me to another question for which I still don’t have a good answer. If Facebook and Twitter are all about sharing, does a repost or a retweet bear the same responsibility as an original post? And does someone who has a thousand friends bear less blame or carry any less responsibility than someone who has over a million? I have felt the pressure and increased scrutiny that comes with a growing Internet presence. It is on some level distressing to think that the more people who are paying attention, the less fun we might have together. Like I said, lowest common denominator of butthurt.

It helps that when it comes down to it, in most cases, I just don’t care very much if my humor offends someone and they unlike me over it. It’s even more amusing when people get huffy and post on my wall about their departure. To that, I’ve said the following: “Unfriending me when I didn’t even know we were friends? It’s like breaking wind when you’re home alone. If I can’t smell you, knock yourself out. #PhantomMenace.”

Grammar Nazis

You’re, your. It’s, its. Their, there, they’re. Are these really so difficult to distinguish and use properly?

Apparently so. On the Internet, grammatical and spelling errors abound, even with (and often because of) our friend Autocorrect. Each post affords yet another opportunity for the undereducated or the maddeningly careless to offend, mobilize and often infuriate the unofficial keepers of The Rules of English.

More ominously, each tweet, limited as they are to 140 characters or less, chips inexorably away at form in favor of function. Three spaces are gained by losing all the e’s in “between” when written as “btwn.” The word “tonight” becomes “tonite” or, shorter still, “2nite.” Will we witness a day where the differences among “too,” “two” and “to” won’t matter, because they are all spelled as “2”?

© rangizzz - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission

The Netizens who keep us all on our proverbial toes are known generally as Grammar Nazis (I didn’t invent the term, so my apologies if you’re offended by the casual appropriation of this word). Their singular mission is to ensure that our rapid transition to a social media-based culture does not result in the wholesale destruction of The Olde Ways.

‘Tis no easy feat. With everyone an author these days on social media, there are far too few properly trained and vigilant editors. Without their watchful eyes, common errors would become commonly accepted errors, and thus by the sheer weight of their misuse become simply commonly accepted. If you think I’m joking, witness how the chill-inducing and non-standard “irregardless” has crept into our speech, and even our prose, since the early twentieth century.

And so the Grammar Nazis have assumed the thankless and wearying task of monitoring the hallways of the Internet, on the lookout for a missing “o” (“this is to cool”) or an extra “e” (“awe, that’s so great”).

How many of you are cringing right now?

One of my favorite sites on the Internet is grammarly.com. For lovers of English, this is a terrific place to peruse for good chuckles and equally satisfying head-shakers.

My personal favorite is the misused pronominal form, as in “between you and I…” — a mistake that ironically occurs when people are trying to get it right. Then there is the tricky use of the gender neutral pronoun, made famous by Sting’s lyric, “If you love somebody, set them free.” I still haven’t gotten comfortable with that, though in the name of gender inclusiveness and non-awkward construction, I can see why we need to go this way. “If you love somebody, set him or her free” just doesn’t have the same resonance or cadence.

Proper punctuation is also quite important. Missing commas can mean all the difference in the world:

In the age of the Internet, where civil discourse frequently is reduced to a comment string on a Facebook post, the Grammar Nazis hold a decisive and rather unfair advantage. No matter how valid an opponent’s point, if it contains a spelling or grammatical error, that merits instant scorn and disqualification. “The phrase is not ‘myriad of ways’ but ‘myriad ways.’ No ‘of.’ If you had any real education, you would know that.”

Indeed, grammar correction online assumes a role not unlike name-calling. “Your English is so atrocious I don’t feel the need to even respond” seems but a long-winded way of saying,
“Home-schooled dumbass.”

Why precisely, though, are the Grammar Nazis so keen to find and correct other people’s errors? Are they fearful of the long and inevitable slide into linguistic relativism, where truth is measured solely by whether an idea has merit and not whether proper grammar is employed? I often wonder, when precisely did we concede that the rule-making was “done,” and that we would all abide by a common, if misguided, set of them? After all, at some point in time the ancestors of today’s Grammar Nazis huddled together in some dark room and set it all in stone. “Enough is enough,” they decreed. “These are the rules, and we’re sticking to them. Final answer. And while we’re at it, yes, we will spell ‘enough’ with an ‘ough’ instead of a ‘nuff.’ Deal with it.”

The loss of the semicolon as a fixture in the English language is perhaps the most galling concession the Grammar Nazis must soon face. Future generations will not recognize it as punctuation to separate two related yet complete sentences; no, its function inevitably will be reduced to a “winky eye” to be paired commonly with its cousin, the smiley close parenthesis. ;)

The Grammar Wars aren’t just about spelling, conjugation or punctuation. I once ignited a fierce online debate with the simple question of whether a sentence should have two spaces after each period, or just one. It turns out, the commonly held practice today is just one — though those of us who took typing in high school (yes, typing) are so accustomed to putting two spaces after a period as a concession to courier font that old habits are hard to break. So far, however, the Grammar Nazis haven’t gotten into the typesetting wars.

I would observe, however, that the QWERTY keyboard that we are all now stuck using is fixed in our culture by the same kind of thinking that Grammar Nazis employ. That is, even though they know there is a better, more rational, more efficient way to structure things, they adhere to the more cumbersome model because this is the way it has been done for so long, and there is no way they are going to change now.