Proofing Social Media, One Meme at a Time
Spotted: 12/14/2016
Creator: Humans of Tumblr
Where do you even start, with something like this?
Yup, you just redo it completely. Is anyone thinking that maybe today’s “texting culture” is having a detrimental effect on people’s ability to communicate effectively?
Use this one instead:
Spotted: 11/23/2016
Creator: Unknown
I almost shared this one until I noticed the glaring error. What native speaker of English says, “What’s the different in X and Y?” The answer is “none.” None native English speakers say that.
So here’s one that makes sense:
Spotted: 11/15/2016
Creator: Unknown
There isn’t much to say about this except random capitalization is annoying. Also, sentence-ending punctuation isn’t a bad thing—especially when you have two perfectly good sentences to end.
Make America Grammar Again! Use this version instead:
Spotted: 11/1/2016
Creator: Kitchen Fun With [sic] My 3 [sic] Sons
I love SomeEcards. They’re funny and retro and snarky all at the same time. For some reason, the site decided to allow users to create their own cards, and that means that people who are borderline illiterate get to muddy up the SomeEcards brand with poorly executed captions. As Kurt Vonnegut would say: And so it goes.
I don’t have a lot of time today, since it’s the kickoff for NaNoWriMo. So I’ll just make a simple list of problems I see here:
See what I did there? If you really want to share this meme, share this version instead:
Spotted: 10/28/2016
Creator: Feel the Johnson
Okay, this one isn’t about the grammar … it’s about the Photoshop. Come on, people! If you’re going to make a meme where you replace Bart Simpson’s chalkboard punishment with a political statement, at least take the time to make the writing halfway believable.
I happen to agree with the original meme that the terribleness of Donald Trump as a candidate does not make Hillary acceptable. I also agree with the converse, that Hillary’s rank detestableness doesn’t make Trump any more attractive as a candidate. So I’ve created versions of both for you to share.
The Terribleness of Trump:
The Terribleness of Hillary:
Spotted: 10/19/2016
Creator: Tank.Sinatra
I thought this meme was a sad (but funny) commentary on bubble-wrap parenting. But true to form, it has several problems.
I’m seeing a lot of people mix up whose and who’s lately. I don’t know whether this is a relatively new thing, or if I’m just paying more attention. Whose is a pronoun/determiner, while who’s is a contraction of who and is. If you’re ever not sure which form to use, try using who is in the sentence and see whether it works or not:
Guess who is son has a made-up gluten allergy?
Nope. That doesn’t work. It’s got to be whose.
Naturally, there are other problems here as well. The way this meme is written, made-up is a compound adjective that comes before a noun, so it needs to be hyphenated. Check out this resource if you’re not sure what that means. Note the hyphen is only required before a noun, so you need it for a made-up allergy but not if you say she made up a gluten allergy. (In the second example, made up is a phrasal verb.)
The last issue here is the use of a question mark and exclamation mark together. While this is often done in informal writing, it’s not appropriate for more formal prose. The rule is that you should never close a sentence with more than one sentence-ending punctuation mark.
Some might suggest that this isn’t a hard and fast rule….
(See what I did there? While it might appear as if I ended a sentence with four periods, which are sentence-ending punctuation marks, what I really did was put in an ellipses and then a single period. So the rule still stands.)
There’s actually a punctuation mark that combines the question mark and the exclamation point. It’s called the interrobang. Isn’t it awesome‽ Not a lot of people have ever heard of this mark, but feel free to use it in this context if you have a hankering.
Here’s a corrected version of this meme:
Spotted: 10/13/2016
Creator: Broke girls do BAD things
Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!
There’s a difference between breath and breath, lose and loose, there and their and they’re, and a whole bunch of other words that intelligent, educated people should be able to distinguish from each other.
While I was at it, I fixed an awkward wording. To my native speaker intellect (which overrules grammar books any day), getting busy is much more idiomatic than becoming busy. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I like my version better.
According to the post by the oddly named “Broke girls do BAD things,” this particular meme has been shared almost 63,000 times! Too bad I didn’t see it before today.
Whether you agree with the message of the meme, for the love of all that’s holy, please share the correct version instead of the original.
Spotted: 10/13/2016
Creator: Unknown
I love the sentiment in this meme, but there are a couple of things wrong here.
The obvious ones are punctuation. We have an aborted ellipses (two dots) at the end of the first sentence. That’s a simple fix—just drop one of the periods. In the second sentence, we have the word though functioning as a mild interjection. (If it were in the middle of the sentence, it would be a parenthetical.) It needs to be separated from Nice try by a comma.
Those are the easy ones. The tricky part is the dependent clause, In order to insult me. There is no overt subject in this clause, but the implied subject is you. It’s definitely not me, since I’m the subject of that clause. The problem comes when you read past the comma and I becomes the subject of the next part of the sentence. What we have here is a dangling modifier.
Another grammar resource, Ask Betty, provides several good examples of dangling modifiers:
While cleaning the house, my wallet turned up.
After killing two victims, the police arrested the murderer.
Hissing furiously the whole time, I was bitten by the snake.
All three of these have the same problem as the first sentence of the meme. Clearly, my wallet was not cleaning the house, the police weren’t killing victims. In each sentence, the implied subject of the introductory (dependent) clause is not the subject of the second clause. It creates a jarring shift as the reader recalibrates in an attempt to figure out who is doing what.
One way to fix this meme would be to change the second half of the sentence to make the subjects match.
In order to insult me, you must first have an opinion I value.
While cleaning the house, I found my wallet.
After killing two victims, the murderer was arrested by the police.
Hissing furiously the whole time, the snake bit me.
Another way is to explicitly state the subject of the first clause. That was the easier way to fix the meme, so that’s what I did:
Spotted: 10/3/2016
Creator: Motivational(?)
There is nothing at inherently ungrammatical about the original version of this meme. What’s “wrong” is that the second sentence is clearly a continuation of a list that began in the first sentence. The four possibilities—smiling, moving on, holding back tears and pretending—all fall under the category of “all you can do.”
It’s hard to guess why the creator of the meme decided to start a new sentence with Move on, but that’s not what’s implied by the text. So I fixed it.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to post “vaguebook” memes, all you can do is use the version below instead of the version above.
Spotted: 9/26/2016
Creator: Motivational(?)
Oh geez. A friend sent me this one, and quite frankly, there’s a whole lot of WTF in this meme. I’m pretty sure that was the point, but still … thanks for nothing, man.
First, let’s address the text. Major required changes include capitalizing the first word, adding a period at the end of the sentence, and spelling out “Anonymous” instead of using an abbreviation. The greater-than sign (>)doesn’t really do much for the quote, so I would get rid of that. Also, since we apparently have a quotation here (albeit an unattributed one), let’s add some quotation marks, shall we?
I’m not going to address the use of feels as a plural noun. Whatever floats your boat.
Attribution is an interesting topic. According to the English Language & Usage forum over at StackExchange, the proper punctuation mark for citing a quote is actually the “horizontal bar,” (U+2015), which is sometimes called the “quotation dash.” Most people have never even heard of the horizontal bar, so the em-dash (U+2014) is an acceptable alternative. The more you know, right?
I was curious about and the image. I’ve seen Pepe the Frog before, of course, and understand the origins of his starring role in the meme. It’s interesting that Pepe’s image was recently reclassified as a “hate symbol” by the Anti-Defamation League. I don’t know whether this meme predates that or not. This picture looks more loving than hateful, so I’m not going to worry about it.
But seriously—doesn’t it look like the white guy is feeling up the frog? I assumed, when I first saw the meme, that this was some kind of spotting technique for people doing squats. To confirm my hunch, I did a Google image search for “spotting for squats.” Guess what I found?
That’s literally the very first image in the search results. Let’s go to Photoshop….
So while we have no idea where the quote came from, we can be pretty sure about the origins of the image. The spotter in the photo is even wearing white!
My last criticism is about the graphic format of the original meme. Any expert will tell you the best aspect ratio for posts on most social media platforms is squarish or just slightly horizontal. Of all of the things that are terrible about the meme above, its composition is one of the worst.
I’m really not recommending that anyone share this meme. It’s weird and creepy and potentially offensive. But if you must share an image of a poorly drawn white guy feeling up a symbol of hate above a barely intelligible quotation that can’t even be attributed to anyone, here you go. Knock yourself out.
