Art Imitating Life

Dammit, English! will be an occasional feature on this blog, in which I discuss annoying, lazy, confusing, unnecessary, and otherwise wrong bits of American English. Additionally, you can find the full collection of these posts at artallen.net/dammit-english.

Hyperbole is a sacred, even hilarious institution of the English language–when it is used effectively. While we all grant that Frank Sinatra very likely did get a kick from Champagne, cocaine, and (while he may in fact not get much thrill from a plane–who does any more?) flying too high with some gal in the sky, we also see that he is making a grand overstatement to win the affection of a woman (Luck, perhaps?). We begrudgingly accept its use in everything from chicken sandwich commercials to, now, nearly ever political campaign ever.* But what about whiny Internet assholes?

I won’t begin to try to attack all hyperbole on the Internet. Much of it does bother me, but really, when you say “fuck my life,” you had better mean it. In the context, we can take “fuck” to mean “destroy irrevocably,” the idea being that a problem was so unsolvable and life-consuming that no refuge could be found in any other, more positive aspect of the fuck-sayer’s life. I find this to be exceedingly whiny and unnecessary in almost every instance.

Don’t misunderstand me here: this is not a rant against saying “fuck my life” in any situation. But let’s be selective! Some major life-fucks deserve FML; others deserve less severe fucks. I will illustrate scenarios and accompany them with appropriate fuck/subject combinations:

• Today I farted in the conference room and everyone knew it was me. Fuck me.
• Today I needed to clean out fifty port-o-johns at the spiciest chili competition. Fuck that!
• Today everyone in the world died. But somehow all the radiation from all those H-bombs doesn’t give me radiation poisoning! I was finally able to read all the books in all the libraries in the world. But then my glasses broke. Fuck my life.

*I said “nearly;” therefore it is not hyperbole! Also, that the statement is a goddamn fact makes it not hyperbole.

I’ve loved social media for years now, based solely on its own merits. The democratization of information (big words for big ideas) has been a critical factor for journalism, politics, and humanitarian efforts for anywhere between two and six years (I start counting at Howard Dean). It takes the dissemination of information partly out of the hands of the Big Guys (Media, Government) and gives it to everybody.*

But yeah, ok, so you see a picture of a plane in a river or you save people from earthquake rubble. Big deal. The biggest achievement of social media has yet to come: letting us know about the aliens. This is genuinely what I am the most excited for social media to bring to us.

See, every sci-fi geek since H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine (decent book; wouldn’t base a genre on it) has been waiting for the aliens to come, and every sci-fi geek since 1948 has known that when they do (or when the did), the government will (did) cover it up. Until now.

If aliens crash near, hover around, or otherwise come in contact with humans, it will be all over the social web. It will be like a virus (but the good kind; not the kind normally associated with alien invasions), first starting as a tweet along the lines of “Um. Aliens?” And then someone will retweet that, and then ten more people will retweet it, and so on. Then maybe it will trend. Then someone will post something to TwitPic, and that will trend. It will spread across Facebook, and only every fifteenth item in your news feed will be not about the aliens. Then CNN will pick it up and show five or six different cell phone videos. Then variants on this will dominate nine of the top ten trending topics (I’m certain something about Beyoncé will still be seven or eight), and it will be otherwise independently verified half a billion times over (that number is likely not an exaggeration, either).

Five days later, the government will reluctantly say something.

Ten years ago, this would not have been possible.

*99 times out of 100 this is a terrible, terrible thing.

Leif has brought up a mechanical concern with Twitter style that has so far gone unresolved by anyone in any sort of position of power. I call that a power vacuum, and I’m here to step in.

Leif wrings his hands:

My head almost went all Scanners while typing the “a @gowalla.” Strunk and White, where are you when I need you the most? Is it “a @” or “an @”?

The correct way to do this is to keep the “@” silent, and I’ll tell you why.

Let’s take Erica Mayer’s tweet

My buddy @jonberrydesign is at the #Olympics working in graphic design! You should follow him, he’s a swell dude <3

Do you pronounce this, “My buddy at-jonberrydesign is at the hash-Olympics”*? I don’t. When I sign up for Twitter, I pick user names that don’t involve “at” being said at the start. My Twitter handle is Punsultant. I am not the at-Punsultant; nor am I running the at-MNBeardOff.

The “@” indicates that the string of letters immediately following it is a user name. Similar symbols include the apostrophe, which indicates possession or acts as a replacement for letters within a word; the period, which indicates the end of a sentence; and the quotation mark, which indicates speech from someone other than the narrator. These symbols are called punctuation and are not pronounced.**

My point is this: “@” is punctuation that Twitter has invented. Find me a reputable style guide that says punctuation should be pronounced and I will start saying “at-username.” Until then, the “at” should remain silent.

*I would like to compete in the hash Olympics.

**Sometimes quotation marks are pronounced when reading aloud. I don’t care.

Another something has changed on the Internet, so wouldn’t you know it, everyone is upset. But the latest major Death of the Internet–the retweet reconfiguration–is a positive change. It is a positive change for more than one reason:

• It preserves the author’s intent by preserving their tweet exactly as they wrote it. How many times have you had to truncate someone else’s tweet to accommodate for their user name? The original tweeter picked their words carefully, and although it has become an accepted practice to remove select words to make room for retweeting superfluence, that’s actually terrible citation practice. As a writer, I love the preservation of intent.
• It draws attention to new personalities. More times than I can count I’ve scanned a tweet and replied to the person who posted it, only then to realize they were retweeting someone else. Putting someone else’s user picture, username, and full tweet in my stream forces me to pause and consider it, which is the (presumed) intent of the retweeter.
• It does not violate your personal space, so shut up. I’ve heard that some people find this new feature intrusive or otherwise violating of their personal Twitter space. This is total bullshit. Retweeting has been around since Twitter has been around and it was not considered a violation. Retweets have always been content in your stream put there by people you choose to follow. This has not changed in any way: the content is tagged as “retweeted by so-and-so.” Honestly. It’s the same thing.
• You add nothing of value to a retweet. Another major complaint about this change is that retweets are no longer able to be annotated. But here’s the thing: do you really add value when you add “love this” “check this out” or “smart” to a retweet? You do not need to add an extra text to endorse a retweet. You are retweeting it; that is an endorsement. And if you really need to add your own commentary within the tweet (have we forgotten there are venues for commentary outside of Twitter? Maybe you could blog it!), they did not somehow deactivate the old way of doing it. People will still know what you mean if you type “is this you in this video lol RT @username blah blah blah.”

When I was 14, I heard George Carlin’s 7 Words You Can’t Say On Television bit for the first time (and then immediately thereafter for the second, third, and fourth times). This codified my political view of censorship: namely, swear words are just words and, as George Carlin said, “the same words that hurt can heal.” And thus I learned to love and appreciate swearing as not simply a way to be vulgar. I realized swearing expressed things in a very specific and unique way.

But I don’t want to get into a discussion on the philosophy of language today. Today I want to express my extreme befuddlement at much of the Polite Internet’s inability to commit to a swear. If you have ever used the following or a variant of the following in a tweet, on your blog, in a text message, an email, or any other form of non-regulated, essentially private communication, I am talking to you:

• f***
• f**k
• f*ck
• s***
• s**t
• s*it

To you self-censors, I say this: you are allowed to use swearwords on the Internet. You will not be issued a fine by the FCC, kids will not start swearing because of you, the fabric of society will not rip apart at the seams like some scene out of Star Trek Generations, dogs and cats will not start living together. If you want to swear, use a swear word. If you don’t want to swear, use a different word. You can say “shoot” and “frick” and “gosh darn” and people might actually find that more entertaining than full-on swearing. But I can tell you: no one finds “s*it” entertaining or valuable. If they’re like me, they find it insults their intelligence at worst, and generally pointless at best.

When you self-censor in uncontrolled media, you look non-committal and stupid. Swear words exist for a reason, and when you put an asterisk in the middle of one, you rob it of any meaning and make yourself look foolish.

P.S. If standard swearing leaves you bored, I would recomend perusing the works of Brad Neely. He takes creative swearing to a wonderful new place. To wit: “Sometimes, if I’m fast enough, I catch a glimpse of the Brain Fuckler, just fucklin’ the shit out of everyone… and we don’t even know it.”

By sheer coincidence, I was asked by American Public Media’s Jon Gordon to say a few words about making people friends on the internet for the radio segment Future Tense. About one sentence of mine was used in the beginning of the segment as anecdotal evidence that social media does not isolate people but, in fact, it gives people richer, wider social circles.

And there’s no doubt it’s true. I’ve had in-person, meaningful interactions (which is to say they’ve had something interesting, new, funny, etc to say) with fully 45 people I met through Twitter. That’s almost half the people I follow on Twitter who I also know in real life. But more importantly, that’s 45 new people in my community I would have very likely not met otherwise. And yes, this includes Emily, who I will have been dating for a year in January.

I was trying to dig for some deeper meaning to this, but I think this is actually pretty profound on its own. This is a the 21st century story.

There are a lot of articles online that suggest you delete any evidence of having a good time or living your life from all of your social network pages. “If an employer sees a picture of you drunk at a bar, they will fire you!” these articles seem to suggest. “If you mention a hedonistic allowance, if you blog that your favorite movie is Blazing Saddles, if you use a swear on Twitter, kiss your job goodbye.” I reject this sphere of thought.

The Internet blends our personal lives, our professional lives, and our idealistic lives. This is definitely a good thing, but it means that everyone is your audience. On the internet, unlike talking face to face, you can’t have a distinct work persona, bar persona, and family persona. But it doesn’t mean you should pretend to be a flawless, one dimensional person online.

Please, do not read this as a rant against professional responsibility. I understand there is a time to be interesting and a time to be professional. The best of us can exist in the happy grey area between the two most of the time. I try to.

Instead, read this as a suggestion that we all have personal lives, and to sanitize the Internet of our personalities for the sake of seeming flawless to potential clients or employers is ridiculous. If an employer does not want to hire me because I have interesting, honest content on my social network pages, I can conclude one of two things:

1) The hiring manager is holding me to a very harsh double standard

2) The hiring manager is a very boring person

In both cases, I say: who needs ‘em? I want to work with fun people who appreciate personality and a sense of humor.

So I humbly bare to you my presence across the Internet: my website, my Twitter, my Facebook… hell, even my rarely-used MySpace. I have nothing to hide. I embrace my love for Blazing Saddles and Scotch. I (reluctantly) share with you the (mostly unflattering) pictures of me on Facebook. I want you to know that I–like you–am a complex, interesting human being.

Yesterday on the popular social networking website Twitter.com, I saw a tweet by @doughamlin that went like this:

@doughamlin *Cough* *Cough* *Honk* *Honk* #swanflu

This inspired me to make all sorts of swine flu puns:

@punsultant @doughamlin *cough* *cough* *swirl* *smell* *sip* #wineflu

@punsultant @doniree @doughamlin or, you know, *cough* *cough* *pickles!* #brineflue

@punsultant *oink* *oink* *smoke* *smoke* #swineflue

@punsultant George Bush was a great president! #swineflew

@punsultant *cough* *cough* *forest* #pineflu

@punsultant @doniree my back is coughing! #spineflu

@punsultant I stepped on this device and all of the sudden I started coughing #mineflu

@punsultant I think my fork is sick. #tineflu

@punsultant as I’ve been waiting here at the bank I’ve developed a cough and a fever. #lineflue

@punsultant OR my cough and fever only exist between two points #lineflu

@punsultant I am sick as an objectivist. #aynflu

@punsultant @MHMorgan if I do work I might get #tryin’flu.

@punsultant your lady doctor is sick #gyn’flu

@punsultant I am sick, but only when I’m lying on my back #supineflu

Which, in turn, inspired many others to make swine flu puns of their own:

@maxsparber Argh, I be struggling to catch me breath in the salty deep! #brineflu

@maxsparber @punsultant Funny, I had the same experience waiting to get pork in England #swinequeue

@eigenman @punsultant @zwjohnson I feel awful with this illness… I think I’m going to go lie on my back #supineflu

@eigenman @punsultant fuck I must have missed it while I was sacking Halicarnassus #rapineflu

@eigenman @julielyda @punsultant @zwjohnson but I do so enjoy upsetting you Julie! #malignflu command it in #()flu form and I’ll stop :D

@eigenman @punsultant @zwjohnson MUCH better #anodineflu

@briannepitt @doniree @punsultant *sniffle* I can’t even afford medication… #declinedflu

@doniree @punsultant @briannepitt *cough* *cough* *moooooooo* #bovineflu

@briannepitt @doniree @punsultant “Bueller… Bueller…” #Steinflu3

@doniree @punsultant @briannepitt *cough* *cough* *meow* *purr* #felineflu

@briannepitt @punsultant *cough* *grumble* *gripe* *sneeze* *exaggerated sigh* #whineflu

@doniree @punsultant I’m a poet and didn’t know it #rhymeflu

@zwjohnson @punsultant it’s not your fork, it’s your food! #dineflu

@chessie @punsultant i got sick because i returned my library books late #fineflu ?

@zwjohnson @eigenman @punsultant I actually feel pretty good #fineflu

@doniree @punsultant *cough* *cough* *river* *europe* #rhineflu

@eigenman @punsultant oh JESUS my hypothalamus just threw up #endocrineflu

I’m sure some swine flu puns have slipped through the cracks. Although, I’m sure you’re already pretty full up on your swine flu pun quota for today.

Not only did Firefox erroneously tell me a common pronoun was misspelled, it provided me with no help in how to spell it correctly:

I do not see a difference here.