MY URBAN KVETCH

Speak Aussie to Me...

So, after my salad-dodger of a flatmate went out to indulge her tanorexia, and I had had enough password fatigue to travel to the Great Firewall of China, I decided to concentrate on expanding my floordrobe.

If you don't understand the first sentence of this post, you might not speak Australish. But luckily, here's a guide for you, so you can learn some of this year's Australish words (bolded above, in case you didn't see 'em).

And SJFs, listen up, here's a tip for you...I recently met with about a dozen young Jewish Australian leaders in their early 20s, and they all complained that their events don't attract women. "Where are the women?" they kept asking me. And I told them that Jewish women in NYC are constantly complaining that there are no men...

Food for thought, eh?

Some Notes About Technospeak

Haven't had a good grammar/semantics rant in a while. So here are two things that have been bugging me, technoverbally speaking. And maybe it's me; maybe I'm just too picky in a way that renders me unfit for human interaction. But before I buy that deserted ranch in Montana to isolate myself from humanity, I thought I'd try venting here first.

As a blogger, I write posts in my blog. I do not say things like, "today, I wrote a blog about Madonna and Kabbalah." I do say things like," today, I wrote a blog post about how Seth Rogen should go on birthright." So, as I understand it, you can "blog," you can "write a blog post," but you cannot "write a blog." Unless you're writing a whole blog. But you cannot use it to mean "individual entry." That's a "post." Isn't it?

While I'm here venting about technospeak, allow me to address the concept of a "viral video." While most appropriately used to indicate a video that started small and become so popular that it's almost an epidemic (hence the medical viral image), some people have begun to use this to refer to any video that they themselves create. "I'm doing a viral video of my son singing the alphabet; it's so cute."  It may be cute. More likely, it's kind of boring to everyone outside the kid's immediate family. But one thing it is not is "viral."

Companies trying to be hip or programs trying to appeal to a youth demographic have begun to create short videos for upload to sites like YouTube, and proclaim them "viral videos." This is akin to me assembling some petri dishes in my apartment and cultivating substances from basic ingredients in my house and then proclaiming them "communicable germs." They might become communicable, or airborne, or viral or whatever, but they aren't currently in that state.

Plus, an insider's note to all of you who are proud of yourselves for using such an advanced term as "Web 2.0" or "social networking"...I know you must think you sound very 21st Century for using these terms that the rest of the world is just now beginning to adopt. You might think that you're so ahead of the game  that you are now tempted to move out to Silicon Valley to see if your familiarity with Facebook can translate into big bucks. But the sad truth is that by the time you and I are using those terms, they're frigates of technoverbiage that have already sailed; people in Silicon Valley don't use the term "Web 2.0" anymore, and "social networking" has become "social media." I know this, but only because I have "people."

So, in closing, please continue to "post to your blog," or "write blog posts," but not to "write blogs." Don't declare a video "viral" until you see it's been passed along to hundreds or thousands of others like the flu-bearing sneeze it aspires to be. And if you're going to use terms like "Web 2.0" and "social networking" to impress your less-tech-savvy friends, say it quietly: because any louder, and Silicon Valley is likely laughing at you and too much laughter on a faultline leads to earthquakes. Just saying.

"Celebrity Apprentice"? Or "Celebrity" "Apprentice"?

I'm torn. When there's a TV show title, you should put the whole title in quotation marks. But when you're trying to make a sarcastic comment using quotation marks -- as in describing people as "celebrities" when they're not really celebrities but are so designated by someone else -- where do you put the quotation marks?

Grammar is hard.

Potato, Po-tahto, Osama, Obama...

Let's call the whole "not proofreading our headers before we publish them" thing off...

Okay, CNN?

THE

Something about the sign bothered her. Nothing wrong per se, no misspellings, no misplaced apostrophes indicating a possessive where there should have been none; but still, it stuck in a crevice of her brain, if such a thing as a brain crevice did even exist, of which she wasn’t sure because she hadn’t taken a science course in years, and which she would be sure to look up later in the dictionary, or at least on dictionary.com, which was her constant companion on such meandering, run-on forays into the things that irked her like this smallish sign on the inside of the bathroom stall door in Old Navy.

PLEASE DO NOT FLUSH
SANITARY NAPKINS,
PAPER TOWELS,
DIAPERS, OR TAMPONS
DOWN TOILET.

Sure, the sign Powers-That-Be had opted for the series comma, which wouldn’t have been her choice had she been at the editor’s desk. But the use of a period indicated that this was intended to be a complete sentence, uttered by an authority somewhere overhead, making requests of squatters in this most intimate of spaces. And as such, it was missing a definite article.

The missing ‘the’ piqued her curiosity as much as it irritated her. Logically, there was certainly room for it in that last line. Aesthetically, it would have improved the sign, lending a near-symmetry by adding letters to that last line, and creating a better, if still imperfect, balance to the text in the five-line poem of the sign. But someone decided not to banish all attempts at symmetry, and didn’t include it. She wondered who that person was, the editor at the sign factory, if such a thing existed, and whether he or she took his job seriously. Who had a grudge with a “the”? What kind of editor—nay, what kind of person—allowed a sentence to be printed, in white letters on a bright red sign, without a vital definite article?

She was there again, in the bad place. The one where she looped into a cycle of grammatical insanity. (Shame on you for using a sentence fragment for dramatic effect, she self-scolded.) She had to get a hold of herself, and with some difficulty, shook off the thought, flushing it away.

Unfortunate Typo of the Day--Winner: JTA

In today's JTA Daily Briefing email of top stories, witness this headline:

An operation planned to repair surgical damage to Ariel Sharon's skill was postponed.

Links to this story. And clearly, that word's supposed to be "skull." I'd make a joke if Sharon's condition weren't so unjokable.

Typo of the Day

(And please, let this be the only one I find...)

Cynopsis, you know I love ya. And I see where you went wrong on this one. But a little fact-checking, please...I'll even highlight the phrase for you and link to IMDB for you...

E! has picked up a movie package from Sony Pictures Television.  This marks the first acquisition of this type for the cable net.  The short list of films includes Mystic Pizza, Fargo and Suddenly Seeking Susan, according to Broadcasting & Cable. 

Or to put it another way:

Madonna is to "Desperately Seeking" what Brooke Shields is to "Suddenly."

Please make a note of it. Thank you.