For whatever reason, I decided to start using Facebook in French. While I'm not a native French speaker, I at least like to believe that I know enough about the language to spot glaring grammatical problems.

At any rate, I noticed that the whizzes at Facebook have yet to write the code to adjust adjectives to the proper form, masculine or feminine. Take, for example, a person tagged in a photo. If the person tagged is male, then the notification should read, "Robert a été marqué dans un album." On the other hand, if the person tagged is female, then the notification should read, "Marie a été marquée dans un album." (Note the extra e at the end of "marquée.") Instead, Facebook just splits the difference and pretends it knows nothing about the gender of the person in the photo: "Albert a été marqué(e) dans un album."

Facebook's approach is not incorrect per se. The whole parenthetical e maneuver is commonly used in situations where the gender of the person mentioned is unknown, such as on a signup form on a website. But, given the huge amount of information users willingly give to Facebook, I feel like they should (and can afford to) pay someone to leverage the gender information each user provides to remove the parenthetical e!