Facebook advertisers will be forced to proofread

I've already said plenty about the grammar on Facebook. The users don't drive me nuts; it's the advertisers.

Now that it's a simple (if not cheap) process to promote an online business, it appears the hard work of writing pleasing ad copy is being taken out of the hands of marketing communications professionals and dropped in the laps of either interns or monkeys.



Copyeditor General's ruling: I think we all know who the idiot is in this situation.

Cute kids will not go barefoot

Is this what we've come to? Clothing companies, under fire for exploiting children, are now going around stealing the shoes from their feet? And not only that, but they're also specifically targeting adorable tykes?

Spotted on Facebook:



Copyeditor General's ruling: If you see a cute kid wearing a single green Doc Marten, tell him I know where the other one is.

We will not login, lookup or checkout

Lest you suspect I'm the kind of gal who insists language be frozen Walt Disney-style, fixed and unchanging, allow me to set the record straight. Language is fascinating because it changes; it's the constant evolution, the regional variations, the historical transitions, that make it so much fun.

In the last couple of decades, technological progress has been highly instrumental in changing the way we speak. Think how recently email, podcast and blog entered the vocabulary; consider the way apple, windows and mouse now have completely different meanings. (For that matter, try to remember the last time you listened to a cassette on your Walkman.)

The web is a particularly rich field for new words to germinate, as online tools revolutionize everything from buying groceries to finding a life partner. The problem, however, is that there are so many sites, and so little standardization, that mutant weed-words are starting to take root.

The ones I notice most often (read: the ones that bug me the most) are unnatural mashups of verb and preposition: login, checkout, signup. As adjectives, they're fine; I have no problem with providing my login name or following the signup process.

But as verbs, they constitute language abuse. This isn't evolution; it's laziness.

Consider the following:





Both of the above are fabulous(ly horrible) examples of the basic lack of understanding at play, using the verb+preposition in the right way in one place (Member Login, "Logout" button) and then, apparently, handing the reins over to a bunch of monkeys to finish up.

Then there are sites on which perfectly fine, commonly used words are tied together in what I can only assume is an attempt to cause me personal pain:



Seriously, when was the last time you had to lookup a word? Huh? Ever? And why didn't they just go all-out and label the button "Lookupit!"

This next one makes me sad because I believe the grapes should be freed. But still, the big purple button suggests either that someone considers both fedup and signup to be perfectly legitimate, or that one is correct and the other has been modified for fun.



It's not the modification that bugs me, you understand; it's the fact that both possibilities suggest a disappointing lack of professional writing ability.

Copyeditor General's ruling: As a lookout for lapses in language, I look out for this kind of thing all the time. And I try to follow up with problematic grammar, though my followup might not be immediate. I just hope there's an eventual breakthrough in web language standardization, which will allow us to break through to more elegant online communication.

(And if you know of examples of verb+preposition verbs that will completely disprove my argument and will make me look like a buffoon, please feel free to set me straight.)

All online content will be proofread first

I know: a lofty goal, to be sure. And it would be wishful thinking on a fantastical level to expect every MySpace comment and blog response to be typo-free.

But it should certainly be true of, say, commercial ad copy posted in, say, Facebook--especially when the ad itself is so vague as to be meaningless:



Did they just finish breakfast or brunch?

Okay, perhaps we can excuse this; plucky online entrepreneurs may be so engaged in the whirlwind of their start-up that they forget to check spelling.

Massively successful, Google-owned video-sharing websites, on the other hand, should have a grammar gatekeeper to check for, say, dangling modifiers:



Copyeditor General's ruling: The Copyeditor General considers herself to be more or less completed already, thankyouverymuch.

Facebook users will not fear basic sentences

One of my favorite things about Facebook is the status update, the editable sentence that gives a quick snapshot into each person's life at the moment they wrote it. The functionality is set up as $name + "is" + $message, with the mandatory verb forcing a particular sentence structure:

Carolyn is watching leaves fall.
Carolyn is currently catupon.
Carolyn is asking you to vote parmo.



I enjoy the challenge of fitting my spontaneous updates into a predetermined grammatical form. But apparently not everyone does. As reported on the allfacebook blog and covered in news outlets from Wired to Salon to the UK's Daily Telegraph site, Facebook is giving in to user pressure and removing the verb from status updates.

What's the big deal, you wonder? Doesn't this allow for greater creativity, enabling users to say how they really feel instead of being straitjacketed into the third-person singular of to be?

You'd think so. But given that the FB crowd already struggles with the simple "is" format--ignoring it altogether and writing things like "John is I hate school" and "Sarah is got a new job!!!" and "Lucy is can't get TiVo to work"--I don't hold out much hope that this new flexibility will improve their language use.

The discovery of a Facebook group called "I die a little bit inside when I see grammatically incorrect status updates" did assauge my fear that no-one else had noticed.

What bugs me most is that the Facebook group pushing for the change, "Campaign to lose the mandatory 'is' from status updates," has 64,000 members. A population equivalent to the City of Portland, Maine, thinks it's just too difficult to start a sentence with "(username) is" and would rather complain about it than figure out how to work with it.

Copyeditor General's ruling: CG is going to continue using the verb to be in status updates.