"I find social media to be a soul sucking void of meaningless affirmation" - Wednesday Addams

[shadowkat]

Social media has been pissing me off today. It does occasionally. Mainly because I try to connect on it - and it doesn't always jive. Also, I've admittedly been irritable of late. A lot of suppressed anger that I can't do anything about. I am furious - but I can't kick or punch or scream at the people that I'm furious with. The good news is I'm not alone, a lot of other people are equally furious. Misery loves company and all that.

Latest? Twitter couldn't understand why people can't remember to use Jim and I went to the store, as opposed to me and Jim. And when I said that it's a rhythm thing - about how the other just sounds better. (Also I have an audio/visual type of dyslexia and tend to flip it and have to flip it back all the time - but I didn't lead with that.) The Twitter poster stated that it was probably from poor upbringing and lack of education. Her Mom was a lawyer and spoke with great punctuation and perfect grammar. (Funny most of the lawyers I've worked with suck at it, but I chose not to mention that. My god, most lawyers write run on sentences.)

My response?

1. I'm a lawyer. 2. My mother is educated and a speech therapist. Both have graduate degrees. My father has published six books. 3. I have a learning disability that causes me to flip things in my head.

Moral? Don't make assumptions and generalizations on social media, particularly about people you don't know.

Also, have I expressed how much the grammar police annoy me on social media? I think it's because they are such hypocrites about it. I read their posts - they don't use good grammar all of the time either. And make all sorts of mistakes. We all do. It's inevitable - unless you have a grammar and spellchecker that fixes all the mistakes.

Wednesday the Television Series

Saw the first episode - it's good. Some really good lines in it.

My favorite so far?

"I find social media to be a soul-sucking void of meaningless affirmation.”

Kinda of true. I'm also kind of rooting for Twitter to crash.

Comments

[shadowkat]

Thank you, that actually makes me feel a lot better. I kind of feel vindicated.

[conuly]

It's such a widespread element of English speech, too. Perhaps "register" was a better thing to note than "speech variety" but honestly, pretty much everybody does it at least some of the time and she darn well knows it.

[shadowkat]

Thanks. I think that's what pissed me off so much. And to throw her accomplished "lawyer" mother at, indicating that I wasn't as educated as she was or my parents weren't?

[mtbc]

Yeah, similarly my wife can write good English (it's not her first language) but in private casual conversation with me it's more error-prone and we're fine with that.

[mtbc]

I should add that my own English is better in my journal than it might be in conversation on Slack or whatever, a pass or two of proofreading typically catches at least a couple of issues. That's just how casual conversation is.

[conuly]

Barring momentary disfluencies, native speakers do not make mistakes in their own native speech. If you're a native speaker of English, your English is not "better in your journal" because that's a nonsensical statement. The English you use when speaking casually is not "worse".

[conuly]

Unless by "better" and "worse" you're speaking strictly of orthographical conventions, I guess - putting "your" for "you're", that sort of thing.