Month: March 2013

National Grammar Day 2013: Sound off, fellow curmudgeons

Click the image to send a National Grammar Day ecard.
Click the image to send a National Grammar Day greeting to your friends.

Today is National Grammar Day, a day for me and my fellow armchair grammarians to gripe about how our language is routinely butchered and bludgeoned, sometimes beyond recognition.

If you need proof, just take a look at your Twitter or Facebook timeline and count how many errors you find in spelling and syntax, and all the misuses of “Your” for “You’re” or “too” for “to,” and vice versa.

In honor of this national event, I thought I’d ask my fellow grammar nerds and curmudgeons to share their pet peeves. To get things started, here’s one of mine:

The misuse of subject pronouns as objects

Ugh. I can’t stand hearing or seeing otherwise educated people use a subject pronoun as the object (as in “Just between you and I, grammar is a dumb thing to celebrate”).

That’s wrong. That sentence should read, “Just between you and me, grammar is a dumb thing to celebrate.” That’s because the objects of that sentence are the pronouns “you and me.” I guess we’re used to seeing the subjects at the beginning of a sentence, but the example I’m sharing here is an exception. Grammar Girl explains this whole subject-verb-object issue better than I (not “better than me,” which is a whole other topic). Check out her recent post and podcast, I Love You: A Subject-Object Valentine.

So, tell me, fellow grammar geeks: What are your pet grammar peeves?

Social media predictions (not that you asked, but…)

Earlier this week, I snagged this tweet from Rohit Bhargava pointing to a collection of social media predictions by marketing, branding and social media experts, all captured on a Slideshare deck on the Dell Slideshare Network. (Rohit was one of the prognosticators featured in this deck.)

I thought some of these predictions were probably spot on. A few were bold. Many were predictable.

Speaking of predictable, I thought mimicking the Q&A format of Dell’s social media predictions would make a good (read: easy to slap together at the last minute) Friday Five feature for this blog. So, here you go — five predictions based on the Dell questions (which were more than five, so I didn’t talk about everything here). You’re welcome.

My Social Media Predictions for 2013

1. What social media channel do you feel is primed to grow its audience base the most in 2013?

Since the question is about audience base, that rules out more mature social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. How about Instagram? Instagram sounds like a good pick.

2. Which social media channel may disappear in 2013?

I doubt any of them will disappear completely. (I still get occasional emails from hi5, which I haven’t used in ages, so apparently someone is still out there.) But I don’t think the new Myspace will go anywhere.

3. What is the one social media behavior you would like to see more of in 2013?

The #humblebrag. Seriously. Done well, the humblebrag is a wonderful bit of hubris and snark. It’s the act of “[s]ubtly letting others now about how fantastic your life is while undercutting it with a bit of self-effacing humor or ‘woe is me’ gloss.” I know that, way back in 2011, I suggested that the “higher ed humblebrag” needed to go away. But that’s because we were all doing it wrong. To see how to do it right, check Harris Wittels‘ writings in Grantland.

4. What social media behavior needs to stop?

LinkedIn endorsements. What is the point? [humblebrag]Hey, I really do appreciate all the nice endorsements about my expertise in blogging, social media, media relations and strategic communications[/humblebrag]. But unless I can include those endorsements in my annual review and parlay them into a big fat raise, they don’t really do much for me. Please tell me if I’m missing something here.

5. What is your best advice for a brand to connect with its audience one-on-one?

I have to agree with Rohit Bhargava here. “I think it still comes down to being human,” he says on slide 14 of the Dell slide deck. “It does require a stronger focus on creating a real voice for all communications. It also takes a deeper understanding of customer questions and how you can answer them.”

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There you have them. My social media predictions for this year, two months into it.

What are your predictions? How would you answer those questions?