TechCrunch writer MG Siegler is certainly no stranger to “innovative” grammar. While experimentation in writing style and the bending conventional rules is often a wonderful thing, MG’s methods cause his articles to read quite awkwardly. It seems he hasn’t learned a thing since I first, shall we say, “critiqued” him, as he has once again brought out the Strunk & White supremacist in me. I get the feeling these incidents aren’t going to stop very soon, so I might as well start keeping count.
Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, we turn our attention to MG’s piece “FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up To Ten Times Faster In 2010“. Once again, MG can’t get two sentences out before screwing something up, and one sentence later proves that he can’t finish his opening paragraph without misusing the em dash:
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This article on TechCrunch is a perfect example of why some people still don’t take Internet journalism seriously. Have a look at the first three sentences:
Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off.
Three sentences in, and writer MG Siegler — a man featured in the New York Times at one point, according to his bio — has already misused both the em dash and the semicolon. Perhaps this is an attempt by Siegler to sound intelligent through the use of esoteric punctuation; both sentences call for the use of boring, everyday commas.
Yes, I know, I’m being a grammar Nazi, and relatively few people care about this kind of thing. The problem, however, is that punctuation communicates ideas that words alone cannot. Letters represent the sounds we make when speaking; punctuation represents the pauses we make in between.
If you think it’s limiting to have only 140 characters to express a thought, try eliminating 90% of the English language. If people stop caring about proper use of punctuation, it will lose its meaning entirely. This will destroy a writer’s ability to communicate voice; without the range of punctuation we have available to us, it’s impossible to read anything as if an actual person might be speaking it. It’s not eliminating 90% of the English dictionary, but it’s certainly eliminating 90% of the spoken language.
Of course, this may be a by-product of the questionable literacy of Internet users. Perhaps very few people still know the difference between a comma, em dash, semicolon, or paragraph break, and thus it no longer matters; every writer is the same to people who don’t know how to read for voice.
To be fair, none of my English classes ever mentioned proper use of the em dash or semicolon; if I recall correctly, I learned both through a combination of my father and Wikipedia. So, yes, this is a complex, deep-rooted problem with all sorts of causes and effects. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed.
Okay, now I’m going to finish reading that TechCrunch article.
“Content” is a Horrible Word That Needs To Die in a Fire
To clarify, the word I am referring to is not “kun-TENT,” which is an adjective (or less often, a verb) related to a state of peaceful satisfaction. I am referring to “KHAN-tent,” the noun, which is quite appropriately pronounced similarly to an evil dude that makes William Shatner scream loudly. This word, a bastardization of “contents,” is a generic term for some generic thing that you shove into a generic container, generally speaking. But lately, as part of media conglomerates’ transformation into Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, this generic product term has come to refer to cultural works: music, movies, news, games, photos, and anything else containing some form of digestible information and/or artistry.
It groups together everything creative in this world as some mundane product like a dishwasher or a lampshade. Casablanca is not a lampshade.
Well, of course it’s not. Isn’t that obvious? Nobody who watches movies thinks of them as generic objects, nor do they think that of news articles or Facebook photos. So why is anyone referring to them as if they are?
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