by George Takei
“GEORGE, YOU’RE SUCH A CHAMPION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, AND OF THE VOICELESS AND DOWNTRODDEN. WHY WOULD YOU MAKE FUN OF OLD PEOPLE WHO RIDE AROUND IN LARKS? I’M A DIFFERENTLY-ABLED PERSON IN A WHEELCHAIR, A STATUS I’VE HAD MOST OF MY ADULT LIFE AFTER A TERRIBLE, LIFE-CHANGING ACCIDENT. YOUR POST HURT ME, AND I’M STILL CRYING AS I WRITE THIS. ISN’T WHAT YOU POSTED JUST ANOTHER FORM OF BULLYING?!?”
Good grief. If we can’t laugh at ourselves, and at one another, in good spirit and without malice, then what fun can be left? If we must withhold all ribbing in the name of protecting everyone’s feelings, then we truly are a toothless society. We will reach what I call “the lowest common denominator of butthurt.”
More recently, during the launch of the iPhone 5, I posted something a fan had sent me that I found wickedly satirical. It showed a police officer asking a homeless man to go camp in front of the Apple store like everyone else. Within minutes, I was accused by many fans of making a joke “at the expense” of the homeless. Dozens voiced their indignation over my “poor taste.” And more than a few fans expressed their sheer outrage at the blatant use of Comic Sans in the caption.
But seriously. Have we as a society forgotten the important place of satire in our cultural dialogue? Have we grown so afraid of offending that we no longer dare pose the hard questions, or even the easy ones? Anyone who missed the irony of our government (represented by the police officer) asking those without money (the homeless chap) to go and camp beside those with money to spend on iPhones either wasn’t paying much attention, or needs a refresher course in political humor. And anyone who thought I was condemning the homeless rather than the state of our society clearly doesn’t know me very well.
When words and images become too politically volatile to even speak or print, we have lost something indeed. I discovered this early on in my Internet forays. When I filmed my “douchebag” video, I called out Arkansas school board member, Clint McCance, for posting on Facebook that he enjoyed it when gays “give each other AIDS and die.” What a role model for our children. McCance apologized clumsily for his “hasty” words, but not before embarrassing himself, his school district, and probably the entire state of Arkansas.
I was determined to answer back with something that would cut to the quick. But I could think of no way to describe Mr. McCance other than as a “douchebag.” Brad worried at the time that “douchebag” was too vulgar for me to say, at least outside the set of The Howard Stern Show (nothing is too vulgar once inside that set). Although Brad finally relented and let me say it — ultimately to over a million viewers on YouTube, goodness me — neither of us expected the torrent of reproach that I would receive.
Apparently, calling someone a “douchebag” is an offense to all women, at least according to the feminine hygiene police. I’ve never understood the logic to this. A receptacle for douche liquid is certainly not a very nice thing to be called. But neither is “Santorum,” and the gay community isn’t getting its panties in a bunch over it. Perhaps that’s because we learned long ago to laugh at ourselves.
© Bernd Jürgens - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission
The fact is, the “douche” is an invention, by men, that tells women they need to wash out their vaginas to be truly clean — in other words, a totally unnecessary and demeaning contraption. Logically, calling someone this would be no slight upon women at all.
Let’s just agree that “douchebag” has nothing to do with women or their bodily functions. In fact, no one even thinks of girly parts at all when you call someone a douchebag. They might, however, think of Clint McCance.
Another common objection concerns name-calling itself. According to the Sensitive Sallies of the world, the use of pejoratives against those who bully and oppress is to be condemned itself as bullying. I once reposted something Morgan Freeman tweeted:
Within minutes of the post, the name-calling police were on the scene with acceptability filters armed and ready, reminding me (as if I needed it) that calling people “assholes” because, well, they are acting like assholes, isn’t going to accomplish anything or change any minds.
I beg to differ. Nobody likes to be thought of as an asshole, any more than anyone likes being thought of as a douche or a monster or a dickwad. So pointing out that people who think of themselves as
homophobes are in fact acting like assholes has a decent shot of having some effect.
More importantly, the tweet was funny. Come on, it’s funny. It’s surprising, concise and dead-on true. That’s why it resonates, and why so many people shared it, including me. It said what so many have wanted to say but never quite had the right vocabulary to articulate. As with the douchebags of the world, calling an asshole an asshole sometimes is exactly what needs to happen.
Indeed, it’s even funnier that Morgan Freeman tweeted it, because you can’t help but hear it in his voice.
When it comes to the proper place of humor, I do have one caveat. There is a time for us to laugh together, and a time when it simply is just “too soon.” Jon Stewart famously delayed further airings of The Daily Show for over a week after the events of 9/11. And my friend Gilbert Gotfread really ought to have delayed, perhaps permanently, his barrage of tsunami and dead Japanese jokes that came on the heels of that terrible tragedy.
Even science fiction fans have reminded me that some wounds are simply too fresh, as with my repost of what Alderaan looks like now, which elicited many condemnations of “too soon.”
As the old saying goes, I was simply looking for fan love, in Alderaan places.
The notion that something is “too soon” has bitten me in the proverbial ass before. For example, a fan sent me a picture of a capsized cruise liner with a smiling “Isaac the Bartender” giving the thumbs up. Not knowing that rescue operations had failed to recover certain passengers, I reposted the picture. I learned with dismay — minutes later from many fans — that families were still in shock and grief over their missing loved ones. I was mortified. I immediately took down the post and issued an apology for the ill-conceived share. This is one of the dangers of the Internet: it is far too easy to post or pass along something that is frankly just in terrible taste.
Which brings me to another question for which I still don’t have a good answer. If Facebook and Twitter are all about sharing, does a repost or a retweet bear the same responsibility as an original post? And does someone who has a thousand friends bear less blame or carry any less responsibility than someone who has over a million? I have felt the pressure and increased scrutiny that comes with a growing Internet presence. It is on some level distressing to think that the more people who are paying attention, the less fun we might have together. Like I said, lowest common denominator of butthurt.
It helps that when it comes down to it, in most cases, I just don’t care very much if my humor offends someone and they unlike me over it. It’s even more amusing when people get huffy and post on my wall about their departure. To that, I’ve said the following: “Unfriending me when I didn’t even know we were friends? It’s like breaking wind when you’re home alone. If I can’t smell you, knock yourself out. #PhantomMenace.”
Grammar Nazis
You’re, your. It’s, its. Their, there, they’re. Are these really so difficult to distinguish and use properly?
Apparently so. On the Internet, grammatical and spelling errors abound, even with (and often because of) our friend Autocorrect. Each post affords yet another opportunity for the undereducated or the maddeningly careless to offend, mobilize and often infuriate the unofficial keepers of The Rules of English.
More ominously, each tweet, limited as they are to 140 characters or less, chips inexorably away at form in favor of function. Three spaces are gained by losing all the e’s in “between” when written as “btwn.” The word “tonight” becomes “tonite” or, shorter still, “2nite.” Will we witness a day where the differences among “too,” “two” and “to” won’t matter, because they are all spelled as “2”?
&nb
sp; © rangizzz - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission
The Netizens who keep us all on our proverbial toes are known generally as Grammar Nazis (I didn’t invent the term, so my apologies if you’re offended by the casual appropriation of this word). Their singular mission is to ensure that our rapid transition to a social media-based culture does not result in the wholesale destruction of The Olde Ways.
‘Tis no easy feat. With everyone an author these days on social media, there are far too few properly trained and vigilant editors. Without their watchful eyes, common errors would become commonly accepted errors, and thus by the sheer weight of their misuse become simply commonly accepted. If you think I’m joking, witness how the chill-inducing and non-standard “irregardless” has crept into our speech, and even our prose, since the early twentieth century.
And so the Grammar Nazis have assumed the thankless and wearying task of monitoring the hallways of the Internet, on the lookout for a missing “o” (“this is to cool”) or an extra “e” (“awe, that’s so great”).
How many of you are cringing right now?
One of my favorite sites on the Internet is grammarly.com. For lovers of English, this is a terrific place to peruse for good chuckles and equally satisfying head-shakers.
My personal favorite is the misused pronominal form, as in “between you and I…” — a mistake that ironically occurs when people are trying to get it right. Then there is the tricky use of the gender neutral pronoun, made famous by Sting’s lyric, “If you love somebody, set them free.” I still haven’t gotten comfortable with that, though in the name of gender inclusiveness and non-awkward construction, I can see why we need to go this way. “If you love somebody, set him or her free” just doesn’t have the same resonance or cadence.
Proper punctuation is also quite important. Missing commas can mean all the difference in the world:
In the age of the Internet, where civil discourse frequently is reduced to a comment string on a Facebook post, the Grammar Nazis hold a decisive and rather unfair advantage. No matter how valid an opponent’s point, if it contains a spelling or grammatical error, that merits instant scorn and disqualification. “The phrase is not ‘myriad of ways’ but ‘myriad ways.’ No ‘of.’ If you had any real education, you would know that.”
Indeed, grammar correction online assumes a role not unlike name-calling. “Your English is so atrocious I don’t feel the need to even respond” seems but a long-winded way of saying,
“Home-schooled dumbass.”
Why precisely, though, are the Grammar Nazis so keen to find and correct other people’s errors? Are they fearful of the long and inevitable slide into linguistic relativism, where truth is measured solely by whether an idea has merit and not whether proper grammar is employed? I often wonder, when precisely did we concede that the rule-making was “done,” and that we would all abide by a common, if misguided, set of them? After all, at some point in time the ancestors of today’s Grammar Nazis huddled together in some dark room and set it all in stone. “Enough is enough,” they decreed. “These are the rules, and we’re sticking to them. Final answer. And while we’re at it, yes, we will spell ‘enough’ with an ‘ough’ instead of a ‘nuff.’ Deal with it.”
The loss of the semicolon as a fixture in the English language is perhaps the most galling concession the Grammar Nazis must soon face. Future generations will not recognize it as punctuation to separate two related yet complete sentences; no, its function inevitably will be reduced to a “winky eye” to be paired commonly with its cousin, the smiley close parenthesis. ;)
The Grammar Wars aren’t just about spelling, conjugation or punctuation. I once ignited a fierce online debate with the simple question of whether a sentence should have two spaces after each period, or just one. It turns out, the commonly held practice today is just one — though those of us who took typing in high school (yes, typing) are so accustomed to putting two spaces after a period as a concession to courier font that old habits are hard to break. So far, however, the Grammar Nazis haven’t gotten into the typesetting wars.
I would observe, however, that the QWERTY keyboard that we are all now stuck using is fixed in our culture by the same kind of thinking that Grammar Nazis employ. That is, even though they know there is a better, more rational, more efficient way to structure things, they adhere to the more cumbersome model because this is the way it has been done for so long, and there is no way they are going to change now.
I do have my moments, too. My own “pet peeve” is with the recent misuse of the word “literally.” Young people are most apt to abuse this one. “I literally laughed my ass off.” Did you now? I see it on you still, so how did you somehow reattach it? “The test was literally the size of a phone book.” Now, which phone book was that, Monaco’s?
Friends, the word “literally” means just that. It actually is, was, or did. If you mean instead to be fanciful or colorful, you must choose another word, such as “figuratively.” Alternatively, you may choose none at all, and we’ll all know you’re being figurative. It’s perfectly fine to say, simply, “I laughed my ass off.” You can’t be figurative if you insist you are being literal.
I confess, I love English. I make every reasonable attempt to craft my public comments within the accepted confines and strictures of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the Oxford English Dictionary folks very, very busy.
Recently, I began seeing a great number of new words used by fans in their wall posts and comments. I thought to myself, why not see if we can bend the rules a bit more and create some new and interesting vocabulary? So I held a “new word” contest among fans, asking them to submit not only the proposed new word, but a definition and an example of how the word would be used in context. To my delight, I received over five thousand submissions!
The winning entry, voted upon by the fans themselves, was this gem:
Source Credit: Michael Whittemore. Used with Permission.
Republican fans were quick to amend the meme to reflect their exhaustipation with the Democrats. The close runners-up deserve mention here as well:
Source Credit: Brandi Collins. Used with Permission.
Source Credit: Chris Parkes. Used with Permission.
I was tickled to learn that the good folks at the Oxford Dictionaries actually took interest in the contest and posted about it on their site:
“HERE AT OXFORD DICTIONARIES WE’RE ALWAYS MONITORING NEW WORDS AND MEANINGS FOR INCLUSION IN OUR DICTIONARIES: ONCE A WORD OR PHRASE HAS GAINED ENOUGH TRACTION, AND WE’VE RECORDED ENOUGH EVIDENCE OF ITS USAGE, WE USE OUR LANGUAGE RESEARCH TO CREATE ACCURATE DEFINITIONS.
IN TODAY’S SOCIAL, VIRTUAL, VIRAL WORLD WE’VE SEEN HOW QUICKLY NEW COINAGES AND USAGES CAN SPREAD, SO WE’RE WATCHING WITH INTEREST AS TAKEI’S FANS SUBMIT NEW WORDS IN THEIR THOUSANDS.”
Oh myyy. I believe I had what they call a “nerdgasm.” I hope that word has made it in, too.
So Grammar Nazis be warned: For each rule and principle you cling to with your fierce, unyielding, and yes, admirable determination, new and dynamic forces are at work that inevitably will undermine your efforts. Antecedents will dangle, prepositions will complete sentences, and infinitives will be split.
After all, it is our continuing mission “to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
Chairman Meow
Somewhere along the way to the digital age, somebody decided that cats conjugate improperly when speaking English, plot the end of the human race, and love to eat cheeseburgers. For some other mysterious reason, these assumptions stuck, and a new breed of cat memes and videos made their way onto the Interweb.
I do love cats, and I actually have three. They are outdoor cats, and we’ve named them Fluffy, Ginger and Evil Eyes. Evil eyes is so named because his eyes have that preter
natural glow to them that only certain cats can boast. They are semi-feral creatures who live happily in our yard. Here I am feeding them. They’re refusing, as cats will, to look at the camera as directed.
As much as I adore cats, my fans love them more. Factoid: There are some 86.4 million pet cats in the United States alone. This in part explains the success of the musical Cats (it certainly wasn’t the nonexistent plot). Whenever I post an image with a cat in it, I can count on a baseline of tens of thousands of “likes” and “shares.” Even if the cat is really ugly.
You probably know that some of the most popular videos on YouTube are cat videos. If you haven’t seen the “Ninja” cat and the “Patty Cake” cats, you aren’t very good at surfing the Net. There are even YouTube videos about how popular cats are on YouTube — including a hilarious one on “catvertising” that makes this very point.
© eldeiv - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission.
I’ve lately asked myself why we are so fascinated by cats. Much of the attraction derives from their highly human-like expressions and the rich variation in their size, color and, often, girth. We see our own exploits, frustrations, and failures in their eyes and their efforts. By contrast, dogs are commonly portrayed as “one-note” creatures that have more unconditional, simpler expressions. It also may explain why there is no musical called Dogs.