[mea] Internetiquette
- From: Anna Olson <annols@xxxxxxx>
- To: MEA Freelists <mea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:32:42 -0500
Here's an article on the emerging Internet grammar police. Anna
JOHN CUSACK tweets with his iPhone and, much like the characters he
plays, his style is fast and loose. “I’m pretty new to it, and if
there’s a spell check on an iPhone, I can’t find it,” he said by
telephone. “So I basically get in the general ballpark and tweet it.”
Consequently, Mr. Cusack has birthed strange words like “breakfasy”
and “hippocrite” and has given a more literary title to his new
movie: “Hot Tub Tome Machine.”
Most of his followers ignore the gaffes. But a vocal minority abuse
him about it nonstop, telling the star that as much as they liked
“The Sure Thing,” his grammar and spelling sure stink. “If you’re
going to be political, maybe learn how to spell Pakistan, and all
words in general,” wrote one supposed fan.
“The vitriol was so intense that at first I didn’t think they were
serious,” Mr. Cusack said. “Because, like, who would care?”
They do. A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of
grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other
people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people
who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are
distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written
in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see
themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.
“It would be kind of nice if people cleaned up their grammar a little
bit and typed in lowercase, and made the Internet a little bit
smarter,” said one of them, Nate Fanaro, a 28-year-old computer
programmer in Buffalo, whose Twitter handle is CapsCop.
Last October, Mr. Fanaro wrote a simple program that detects tweets
written in capital letters and automatically sends one of several
snappy responses, like “This isn’t MySpace so maybe you should turn
your caps lock off.” So far, he has issued more than 130,000 of these
helpful reminders, including at least 205 to one particular user, a
woman in Singapore. (Oddly, with little effect.)
“Some people don’t really understand that it’s just not good Internet
etiquette” to type in all capital letters, Mr. Fanaro said.
Yes, he and the other Twitter cops do get quite a backlash, much to
their delight. Mr. Fanaro posts a phone number on his Twitter profile
page, and his voice mail is full of death threats and foulmouthed
rants. For laughs, he sometimes takes his phone to a bar and plays
the messages for his friends.
Provoking an irate reaction seems to be largely the point.
GrammarCop, one of several people who seem to exist on Twitter solely
to copy-edit others, recently received a beatdown from the actress
Kirstie Alley, to whom he had recommended the use of a plural verb
form instead of a singular. “Are you high?” Ms. Alley wrote back.
“You really just linger around waiting for people to use incorrect
grammer? you needs a life.” (One of Ms. Alley’s people said that the
actress was too busy to comment for this article.)
A life, indeed. While some of us may live to host weight-loss shows,
others find solace in pedantry. Fans of the late journalist and
linguist William Safire may recall his “Gotcha! Gang,” readers who
liked to point fingers at the occasional lapse in Mr. Safire’s weekly
language column for The New York Times Magazine. He once described
them as “a hardy tribe obsessed with accuracy and a lust for catching
error in others.”
The same could be said of the Twitter gadflies, whose constant
yipping at their victims gives a bit of an edge to the free-for-all
dialogue on the site.
“There’s always this sarcastic humor pervading Twitter, where people
will see something that someone has posted quite innocently, and
they’ll respond to it in such a way that just is like a slap,” said
Lance Ulanoff, editor of PCMag.com and a frequent tweeter. “Then
what’s worse is that that gets re-tweeted, so now it’s like you got a
bunch of people standing around you, pointing and laughing.”
Among the laughers and pointers is Jacob Morse, a 27-year-old user
interface designer from Richardson, Tex. Last year, he and some
friends started a Web site — Tweeting Too Hard — devoted to mocking
self-important Twitter users. There, people can discuss fake-humble
tweets like, “I gave my cleaning lady a raise today, even though she
didn’t ask, as my own little contribution to fighting the recession.”
Wrote one commenter: “Let’s hope she was grateful enough to overlook
the bionic condescension.”
Each post on his site links to the Twitter account of the person who
wrote it, helping her or him notice the ridicule. “There is something
just inherently enjoyable about putting cocky people to shame,” Mr.
Morse said. (Hecklers take note: Mr. Morse recently brag-tweeted
about having his picture taken for this article.)
Enforcing etiquette on Twitter is basically begging to be called an
idiot, but those who do it don’t seem to mind. “With Twitter
particularly, the feedback is so intense and so immediate, it does
something very particular to your ego that even the blogs don’t,”
said Xeni Jardin, a partner in the blog site Boing Boing and a usual
suspect on Twitter. “That feedback rush is like pouring plant food on
weeds.”
It’s hard to tell, but the number of Twitter accounts devoted to
pointing out other people’s language foibles does seem to be growing.
Among the more mentionable ones are Grammar Fail, Grammar Hero, Your
Or Youre, Word Police and Spelling Police, which for a time fixed
Español malo.
A user called Twenglish Police monitors Australian tweets, inserting
himself into other people’s conversations to offer advice like: “
‘Funnest’ is not a word. Even if Apple used it. You’re welcome.”
“I don’t want to get them worked up,” said Tom Voirol, who runs the
Twenglish Police from Sydney. “I just want to point things out.”
What is it about human nature that we seldom feel grateful for such
guidance? Barbara Bailey, a 54-year-old Web developer from Littleton,
Colo., runs a blog called Twitter Fail, where she mocks tweets that
she considers stupid. She once made fun of a man who used multiple
Twitter accounts to post the same things.
“He started calling all the phone numbers he could find that were
associated with me, he started calling my clients, then he had some
guy claiming to be his attorney call me,” Ms. Bailey said. She
promptly took down the post about him.
For his part, Mr. Cusack has refused to be silenced. In early April
he issued an ultimatum, threatening to block from his account anyone
who sniped at his spelling or grammar.
It didn’t work. The people he blocked would return with new account
names, “and they’d behave like cranky, obsessive trolls,” Mr. Cusack
said.
He has been trying a new strategy, he explained by e-mail: first, he
spells things wrong on purpose to get the critics riled up, and then
“I blockthem executioer style now with no warning!!”
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