Just Be Nice
Spotted: 9/30/2016
Creator: Inspirational Quotes Genie
Almost every day we see pleasant sentiments in memes that are spoiled by grammatical problems. At the risk of hurting the feelings of whoever created this one (after all, I don’t know what’s going on in his or her personal life), I’ll tackle a few issues today.
First of all, people have lives. The use of the plural possessive pronoun their is a good indication that life should be plural as well. Also, the comma in the original here is a comma splice, meaning it’s joining two sentences that really should stand alone. I think the meme reads better with the comma after lives, a period after nice, with a new sentence beginning at it’s.
Let’s give credit to the meme’s author for using it’s correctly (as a contraction of it and is) and the correct form of their. Yay, team!
There’s another possible way to punctuate this same text:
You seriously have no idea what people are dealing with in their personal lives. So just be nice—it’s that simple.
I’m sure there are people who would say, “You can’t do that, because it’s wrong to begin a sentence with a conjunction.” Those people can go soak their heads.
You’ll also note that I marked “Type ‘Yes’ if you agree” as a mistake. Sure—here in America we would use double quotation marks instead of single quotes in this context, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is with “like farming” (or, in this case, comment farming).
According to this article on Forbes.com:
How are scammers exploiting “like-farming?” Scammers post positive stories on Facebook to garner a large number of “likes” and “shares.” And the more engagement a post receives, the higher it will appear at the top of the News Feed — which is how the scam gets a lot of attention. When the scammer posts a story, it appears harmless….
Once a certain threshold is met, the scammer will completely change the post or Facebook Page into products that receive commissions or request credit card numbers. “They may also sell the page and information that was collected from the ‘likes’ with a more direct threat of gaining access in an attempt to gather credit card numbers that may be stored for certain Facebook apps, passwords or other personal information,” said the Better Business Bureau in a new release last year. “New pages created from gathered data may be used to spread malicious software to compromise data or spread malware. The best approach is to think before you like.”
Beware any meme that tells you “Like for Yes, share for No” or some such nonsense. More than likely (heh) it’s somebody trying to build momentum to push a product, company or organization that you might not agree with. Resist the urge!
Here’s a version of the meme that you can share with a clear conscience:
