This week I posted a survey on twtpoll, asking people the following question:
Which would you rather have in your home: Eddie McGuire or a steaming pile of poo?
The results were emphatic:
While this was a terribly entertaining result, I did it to point out some of the problems with the many, many survey stories we see in the media.
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In my current source of employment, I often have to apply my immense knowledge of grammar and style (not!) to reviewing other people’s work. Amazingly, most of the time they don’t hate me for doing this.
This gives me an opportunity (and audience) to rant about trends in modern English communication that piss me off. And lately, two words in particular have made my shit list:
In recent years it has become popular in Australia to say, for instance, “I received the documents via email”. This is a habit we appear to have picked up from our American cousins, who never use a simple word when an ostentatious one can be utilised. (For instance, a person we call an anaesthetist, they call an anaesthesiologist, which is longer and fancier sounding, and also stupid; the doctor in question does not study the science of pain relief, he or she gives you pain killers).
Anyone who has visited Italy will realise that ‘via’ comes from the Latin word for ‘road’. In English, the OED defines it as:
1 travelling through (a place) en route to a destination. 2 by way of; through. 3 by means of.
If you substitute definitions 1 or 2 of ‘via’ into the sentence “I received the documents via email”, it makes no sense at all. And why would you say “I received the documents by means of email”, when you could just as easily say “I received the documents by email”? This way you save a whole letter and avoid sounding pretentious. I call that a win-win.
I have noticed it’s quite popular to construct sentences in the form of “With [some sort of trend happening], [some consequence of this trend can be observed].”
It is hard to put in words exactly what is wrong with structuring sentences this way, aside from a personal dislike. This construction is overused and often leads to overlong, overly complicated sentences. Also it is a weak way of showing causation; I always prefer to say “[Something is happening] as a result of/because of/due to [some trend]“. But that’s just me.
From an AAP wire report, ‘PM to NSW: get your act together‘.
Asked if Mr Rees had his full support or whether he also needed to get his act together, Mr Rudd replied “Yes”, although it was unclear to which part of the question he was responding.
Another day, another publication ‘restructures’ its team, another journo goes out into the world trying to earn a living on nothing more than his wits.
This website will serve as my online portfolio and first point of contact for information on my freelance work, how to contact me and what I can do for you.
I’ve been blogging for nearly a decade on various defunct and still-existing sites. This blog will tell you all about my professional freelance work and thoughts on the media, technology and business landscapes. There will probably be a fair amount of pimping and self-promotion; don’t say I didn’t warn you.
If you’re after more personal, political or plain silly thoughts, head over to my vealmince blog.
I’m sitting here at the dining table with the radio burbling away in the background, looking out at the garden and thinking, this isn’t such a bad way to earn a living. I wonder how long that will last…
I take no credit for this, given it’s all the work of @cankles, but with permission I give you the 10 most annoying (and sadly too common) tweets of all time…
10 “Man, I’m soooooo busy.” Really? So why are you tweeting this again?
9 “I’m having an awesome time at *insert club/pub*” So awesome that you’re tweeting it. By yourself. In the corner.
8 RT the popular kids “OMFG, Guy Kawasaki just Tweeted something! Quick! Seth Goddin just posted a new blog. Link. Link. Link. RT. RT RT.”
7 “It’s hump day. Only 2 more days till the weekend!!!!” Wednesdays: they happen every week. Man your life is boring.
6 “I have so many emails to answer” Right, so I’ve noticed you tweet a lot but haven’t answered my F*&cking email from last week
5 All day public Twitter conversations. There’s better technology for this (IM,DM, email…) or did you just want everyone to see?
4 “Hey everyone, I have THIS MANY followers” So what? That guy. In that movie. Yeah, he still has a bigger thingy.
3 “Re-Tweet ME! Digg My Link!” We get it, you did something on the Internet. You’re a big boy/girl now.
2 Follow Friday. It’s like one giant… circle thingy.
1 Spamming your friends with an internal monologue of what you’re thinking all day. Like aggregating a top 10 list.
Last week Jonathan Crossfield wrote about the difference between Twitter and other social networks, explaining that Twitter is not well suited for broadcasting to your friends some pithy observations about your cat or what you had for breakfast. In Jonathan’s mind, Twitter is a serious networking tool, while Facebook is about keeping up with your friends and playing Scrabble or annoying vampire and zombie games.
You may not agree with Jonathan’s pro-Twitter/anti-Facebook fanaticism, but he raises an important point, namely Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have different audiences and different purposes. If Facebook is a pub, Twitter is a new-media or IT conference.
Despite this, many people link their Twitter, Facebook and other social network statuses. I tried it because I was tired of coming up with different things to say to my Facebook and Twitter audiences. But after about a week, I gave up. In the process, I discovered five reasons why linking statuses is a very bad idea.
Try to construct a sentence that answers the question ‘What are you doing?’ for Twitter, but also makes sense with the your name in front of it, as it appears in Facebook. It CAN be done, but it’s hard work and nobody bothers. Your Twitter-using friends on Facebook will probably understand, but everyone else will think you have trouble constructing a grammatical sentence. If you’re OK with that…
There are occasions when community-minded individuals decide to twitstream an event they’re attending for the good of the general public. While it would be churlish to question such altruism, it has an unintended consequence: since Facebook redesigned itself to be more like Twitter, it floods people’s Facebook pages, often with information relating to some conference (is that what #SXCW09 is?) or TV show they couldn’t care less about.
Yes, it’s possible to switch you off temporarily, but people are more likely to forget to turn you back on, or block your Facebook updates permanently. This defeats the purpose of linking your statuses in the first place.
One of the things I like about Facebook is when you post a link, it pops up a headline, summary and picture. This doesn’t work when your tweet gets automatically posted to your Facebook status. Also, tweets usually use abbreviated links to save space. In the real world, people like to have full URLs because they convey important information such as the site the page is posted on, and what it’s about. It’s a luxury Twits have learned to live without, but most people are quite fond of it.
The best way to illustrate this is with an average tweet:
zaphod Oh noes! RT @ford_prefect: OMG @arthurdent just told Vogon guard to FOAD. FAIL! http://aa.bb/R3G04 #gettingthrownoutofanairlock
To someone who has been using Twitter for a while, this makes perfect sense. In this case, someone called zaphod is expressing concern and relaying a message from his friend ford_prefect about something his friend arthurdent told someone, which did not have the intended result. There’s a link for more information and a hash tag for a common search term.
To normal human beings (that is, most of your Facebook friends), this is complete gibberish.
Real people don’t refer to their friends as @nickname or tag their major #keywords for searchability. They don’t speak entirely in impenetrable acronyms, obscure references and exclusionary dialects like Lolcat. They use full-length URLs which describe useful things such as the name of the site (see #3 above).
Of course, some people have learned to use words efficiently and communicate entire, perfectly formed concepts in under 140 characters. Like today’s tweet from UK artist/writer Warren Ellis:
Books I will write one day – IT COULD BE WORSE, I COULD HAVE STABBED YOU TWICE: How To Train Your Editor
If you can tweet like that, ignore this point.
A lot of ‘normal’ behaviour on Twitter seems impolite or even antisocial in the real world. Two examples: nerdish obsession and shameless self-promotion. When Google released its Chrome browser, Twitter was flooded with discussions, links and boasts about who had Chromed and what they thought of it. People who didn’t care about Chrome, or were on Mac OS (it was released on Windows first) were bored senseless.
And if you walked into a pub and told everyone about the great blog post you just wrote, you’d either be ignored or glassed.
Most people who link their Twitter and Facebook statuses write primarily for the Twitter audience and consider Facebook another channel to get the word out. This doesn’t work.
Unless you’re consciously writing for both audiences at once, you’re better off keeping them separate and tailoring your communications to different audiences. Your friends will thank you for it.
Having successfully completed Japanese for Beginners, I’ve moved on to Japanese Level 1, which has kicked up the difficulty a notch or two.
We have been learning a lot of counter words. The way you count digits such as phone numbers (ichi, ni,san…) is not the same as round objects (hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu…) or flat objects (ichimai, nimai, sanmai…) or long objects (ippon, nihon, sanbon…) and so forth. Times, days, weeks, months, hundreds, thousands, ten-thousands… all have different counters with rules (ish) and loads of exceptions. Mayumi Sensei has been teasing us by mentioning strange counters, such as the one for small animals (ippiki, nihiki, sanbiki… I think).
How many can there be, I wondered? Wikipedia has a list of roughly 120 counter words for different objects.
There is one for board game matches and radio and television stations (kyoku) and another for guns, sticks of ink, palanquins, rickshaws and violins (ch?).There is another ch? (same pronunciation, but different kanji – Chinese character) which applies to tools, scissors, saws, trousers, pistols and cakes of tofu, and a third ch? for city blocks.
When I mentioned this to my friend Matt, who lives in Hokkaido, he said:
Don’t worry about those counters, I think people generally only use about five different kinds:
- Hitotsu, futatsu etc for beer, counters you can’t remember
- Hon for slender objects, ie bottles of beer
- Mai for flat objects, ie plates of food to have with beer
- Piki for small animals, ie talking about crush videos while drinking beer
- Nin for people, ie the number of people the waitress must seat to drink beer
- Nen for years, ie the number of years drinking beer in Japan
For reasons unclear to me, I received a box of Mother energy drink cans in the post from a PR company last week. They were accompanied by a flyer/media release, titled “Mother: New Taste, Double the energy kick*” with a footnote explaining that this was compared to a 250ml can of the old Mother. (The new cans being 500ml each, this is hardly surprising.)
The release said:
OK, we admit it! What were we thinking when we made Mother taste so damn awful? Turns out no-one liked the taste of Mother so we’ve hunted down the idiots that concocted the vile potion and ‘processed’ them accordingly to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.
It continued along the same lines, mentioning gonads at least once in each paragraph:
It tastes nothing like the old one, so man up, grow some balls and take the challenge!
New Mother – it’s here, it’s got double the kick* and it’s got balls – do you?
To prove you’ve got the balls to handle the new Mother…
The copy on the can was presumably churned out by the same pseudo-hipster idiots who wrote the phoney aren’t-we-cool-and-casual blurbs on Glaceau VitaminWater, another Coca Cola product. The can says:
Warning! High caffeine content… OK, we know that’s why you’re drinking it, but our lame legal guys made us warn you not to feed this to kids, up the duff women or the weak who just can’t tolerate it.
The can makes several other references to testicles and masculinity as well as clarifying that the new formula tastes nothing like the old one.
So evidently the target market for this product is constantly masturbating retarded 14-year-old boys. None of whom read the magazine I edit, which makes the PR exercise highly questionable.
And the new taste?
Utterly, utterly foul. Really vile.
But at least there’s more of it!
From the SMH online front page:
