Assorted Afflatuses

When I signed up for facebook a little over a year ago, I had two complaints.

First, as a constant advocate for the active voice, I could hardly contain my rage to see facebook restricted my facebook Status to the verb, "to be." To be ranks, at least in my mind, as one of the most dull verbs in existence. A very useful verb, to be sure, but quite dull. I mean, "Bob is thinking the sky looks amazing," sound a lot more kludgey than, "Bob thinks the sky looks amazing." Fortunately for me, and for the ghosts of William Strunk and E. B. White, the facebook folks changed that. I can now list my status as, "Joseph bangs his head against the wall in frustration."

Second, facebook seems to have failed, at least in a grammatical sense, in its efforts to remove gender bias from certain elements of the site. Whenever a user changes some element his Profile, for example, facebook's magic feed-generator slips a little notice, such as, "Joseph added 'Alphabeat' to his favorite music," into my "News Feed."

Sometimes, this is not a grammatical problem. When users have specified their gender, facebook generates a grammatically correct sentence: "Sean added 'Casablanca' to his favorite movies" or "Gwen added 'L'Amant' to her favorite books." But, when the user, out of cowardice, laziness or indecision, leaves the gender box blank, facebook spits out a message such as: "Elizabeth removed 'skiing into trees' from their activities."

I suppose the previous sentence could be correct, if Elizabeth were a team, organization or some other multi-person group or organization. Suffice to say, however, "Elizabeth" usually refers to a single person. As such, it needs a singular pronoun! "Elizabeth removed 'skiing into trees' from his or her activities," would work, and it serves as a gentle reminder to users to step off the fence and declare a gender.

Services like instant messaging and text messaging have done a lot to degrade language, though mostly through their technical constraints. When a message must contain no more than 120 characters, people must make sacrifices. Facebook, however, has none of these technical constraints, and, more grating still, it actively reinforces an error many people already make — substituting "their" for "his or her" — as correct and acceptable. The facebook team, though, deserves kudos for changing the status options. It makes my life read as much less static.