Face off

As I noted in this post, back in May I did give in to the unrelenting hounding acquiesce to kind requests from friends and joined Facebook.

And over these past months since that time, what that has meant is about once a week I actually bother to log in and glance at the status updates from those of my Facebook buddies who actually bothered to log in and enter something in the "What are you doing right now?" field. I have not participated in many games or other means of time-squandering forms of entertainment offered by the social networking site--not because I considered myself "above" those activities but merely because that wasn't how chose to spend my online time.

Recently I accepted a Thanksgiving greeting from a friend. Clicking on link it brought up another page that had links to other applications vying for my mouse to click upon.

I fully admit that I'm not sure how these links get placed on these pages, but I have to imagine that were they not effective, those who choose to put these links up wouldn't bother.

And on this page with my pleasant Thanksgiving greeting from my friend, one of the larger fonts on the page was on a link that read thusly:

Someone thinks your dumb

Here's a screen shot:

And I thought, Clearly that someone thinks I don't the difference between a contraction and its homonym, a possessive pronoun.

Then it hit me: Although this seemed like another example of blithe disregard for language on the internet, it could just as easily be a shrewd ploy to lull me into thinking, If they're making such egregious errors on the link, imagine how simple the quiz must be.

I was too clever to fall for it, but I applaud the effort.

Or, at least, I choose to applaud the possibility that it was a deliberate reverse-psychological effort to goad me into compliance, mostly because the delusion that we're in a post-post-contemporary grammatical era makes me feel better than concluding it was merely another example of the aforementioned blithe disregard for language.

I mean, the line below that does correctly use "their" (rather than "there" or "they're"), so it's not as though there was no cause for optimism.

Things are only getting worse if you interpret them the obvious way.

Nonetheless, I won't be playing these Facebook games; I'm too busy with this nonsense.