Facebook Goes Grammatical — Who Woulda Thunk It?

It brings a tear of joy to my eye to think that a website is taking steps to become grammatically proper.  Listen, we English majors have to find satisfaction somewhere, right?  Facebook is working on a way to make grammar significantly more consistent. 

Though you might not care one way or the other if your friend's status update reads, "Jimmy John is Does anyone know where the nearest Chipotle is?" Facebook is of the opinion that such odd inconsistencies need to be eliminated.  A while back, Facebook changed the status system so users could insert their own verbs in place of "is," one of the moves towards becoming grammatically proper.

The biggest issue in front of Facebook is that as the social networking site expands to other countries and languages, terms that relate to gender and such are not necessarily as ambiguous as they are in the English language.  For instance, when a user who hasn't updated his or her profile to indicate gender, an update will read something like "Janey updated their photo album."  Of course, it would be cruel to imply that Janey is schizophrenic and very well might be a few people updated their colletive photo album.  For those of us who don't have multiple personalities, that just reads funny.

However, the problem is getting people to identify their gender.  All the grammatical issues that arise on Facebook, including the irritating misuse of verbs in status updates, simply come down to user error.  Facebook is going to be sending out notifications to users who haven't identified their genders in the coming weeks in hopes of nailing out that particular inconsistency.

But as Yahoo! points out, how can Facebook delicately go about the issue of identifying the sex of a trans-gender person?  That would certainly make for an uncomfortable string of emails between a user and a Facebook employee, wouldn't it?   

Again, it all really comes down to one of the regrettable drawbacks of social media, which is user error.  Try as you might, there will consistently be people who have no idea what proper grammar is, and that is fine.  If everyone wanted to know the ins and outs of a dangling participle (riveting information, truly), there would be many more language majors in the world.   

I can say definitively, as one who does work as a copy editor, that in the world of internet media, grammar is really something you have to be willing to accept will never be perfect.  Of course, that doesn't mean the obsessive-compulsive corrector in me doesn't want to grind the concept of a compound sentence into a writer's head so they are enlightened by the beauty that is proper grammar.  But sometimes you just have to let things slide.

I won't fault Facebook for doing what it can to bandage up common user error.  After all, what's the point of being an uber-rich company with a talented staff if all they do is sit around, drinking beer and "poking" each other?  Don't expect miracles, or that users will identify their genders because you email them, and move on.