The word nerd wins American Idol!
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Month: May 2008
Obama pulled ahead of Hillary Clinton in the superdelegate count two days ago, and is poised to bag a major endorsement this evening in the U.S.
So when Edwards takes the podium after I’m fast asleep in Berlin, take a moment to consider Obama’s latest grammar mistake, memorably noted by Radio Free Mike.
The senator from Illinois distanced himself once and for all from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright during a press conference, with an even-tempered and eloquent kiss-off. However:
…he was somebody who was my pastor, and married Michelle and I, and baptized my children…
Ahem. That would be Michelle and me, wouldn’t it?
It’s not the first time that Obama has mixed up his pronouns. He seems to have a penchant for this particular error, one his wife, Michelle, has also made.
Michelle, on the other hand, has also done exactly the opposite:
Let me tell you who me and Barack are…
There is a telling difference between the mistakes being made here. While both of the Obamas made the same “for I” mistake, when talking about Reverend Wright, only Michelle made reference to “me and Barack” in a subject context and only then when refuting accusations of elitism.
If ever there was a mistake made by grammar elitists, the “for I” mix-up is it. Using a subject pronoun (“I”) when the context calls for an object pronoun (“me”) is over-correction, the result of hundreds of well-meaning grade-school teachers and bifocaled aunties reminding you that it’s not “me and Susie went to the bathroom” but “Susie and I.”
It’s interesting, then, that Michelle seemed to be aware of this class distinction in her own speech, saying moments later that she is the product of “a working-class upbringin[g].”
Obama, on the other hand, gets caught in the grammar mistakes of the elite. But what else is there, really, to ding him for? The man’s an outrageously eloquent speaker. Take a look at what else came out of his mouth at the press conference on the Wright debacle:
What particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks was somehow political posturing.
I gave an audible “wow” when YouTube-sized Obama spoke these words to me. When you get rid of the repetition, this is an impressively wordy statement to make off the cuff during a press conference.
Indeed, is it too impressive? Should Barack take a page from Michelle? I got laughed at in junior-high detention when I said I didn’t know the “procedure”. Hillary trounced Obama among working-class West Virginia voters yesterday—who can guess what the electorate will make of him and his verbosity in November?
Emoticons: to use or not to use?
I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile– some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.
Vladimir Nabokov, 1969
Emoticons, those smiling/frowning/Homer Simpson faces that come out of the punctuation marks on your keyboard, are a different sort of written communication. They can add warmth to a chilly business e-mail, or liven up a chat in a more dignified fashion than that abominable LOL.
Digression
However much I disapprove of out-loud LOLs and OMGs, I did always love how ROTFLMAO reverberated in my brain after I would read it on screen. Something about it reminds me of Animal from the Muppets:
ROTFLMAO! ROTFLMAO!
Emoticons and Impropriety
Just like this blog, emoticons tread a fine line between informality and professionalism. They give you more power over how your words will be interpreted. But when is it appropriate to insert one into electronic communication? Is their use ever required? What do they say about the writer? It’s been over ten years since e-mail came into common use: are there any hard-and-fast rules on when it’s okay to put a smiley face on that “nice to meet you?”
SEND, a 2007 book on e-mail by two publishing veterans, has some great suggestions. At the time of publication, the New Yorker even said they had “put themselves forward as the genre’s Strunk and White” (and you know how I feel about Strunk and White).
For David Shipley, deputy editorial page editor and Op-Ed page editor of The New York Times, and Will Schwalbe, former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, clarity goes hand-in-hand with e-mail etiquette.
If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices, and anxieties.
Ergo, emoticons.
How Far Should You Emote?
Sometimes that insertion of tone is awkward, especially if it implies that your own words aren’t good enough to communicate your meaning. I agree with Shipley and Schwalbe, however, that a little awkwardness can be necessary. It’s certainly preferable to offending or otherwise alienating your reader. Indeed, after reading that Talk of the Town piece on their book, I started using far more exclamation points in my own e-mails, as they recommend, to illustrate enthusiasm for a project or emphasize my receptiveness to new ideas.
But I stopped short of using a Homer Simpson face ( ~(_8^(|) to soften up my blunders. Although Shipley and Schwalbe rubber-stamp their use, I am still chary with emoticons. You never know what your addressee might think.
When my boyfriend and I first courted over e-mail, I sent him long and literary letters lacking any parenthetical faces. Could I have been trying to keep him on his toes during those uncertain months of long distance? Or were we just doing our best to inject some old-fashioned epistolary romance into an electronic age?
Perhaps I just guessed early what I learned today: he hates emoticons.