Facebook! I am pissed off with you! Two reasons!
Here’s the situation. First, I’ve been getting a lot of really creepy posts from a site which is called Poetry, Art and White Lace Beneath the Great Willow. I don’t know if they are at fault or if their only crime is sloppy moderation, because that’s always a possibility. I am not blaming Facebook for this. People post a lot of shit everywhere, because for some reason people just love being assholes. They spray paint crap on public monuments, they throw litter on the grass in public parks, and they do it on purpose because they hate the world.
The posts, in the most recent cases, were announcing the deaths of Simon Cowell and Sylvester Stallone, which sent me straight to their Wikipedia pages to check, which is what I always do, and they are both alive and well, I was glad to see.
So, I’ve tried to block and hide posts from that site and I get back ‘Action cannot be completed at this time’ and the best I can do is report them.
So, this morning, not wanting to go through the whole foofaraw, I just hit the X at the upper right hand corner and got back the reply “You will see less posts like this.” Facebook, what the hell is wrong with you? Never mind the fact that what I actually want is to see NO posts from this site, and NO posts of this nature, and that it’s really the lowest of the low to post a post saying somebody is dead just for shits and giggles, when they are actually still alive.
The thing that pisses me off is the obvious grammatical error. Fewer posts, Facebook, FEWER! Not less. Less is for uncountable items, i.e. less truth, less justice, less oil, less sunshine. Fewer is for countable items, like posts. One post, two posts, etc…
I don’t feel I’m being overly didactic. I don’t worry about putting a preposition at the end of the sentence, because there are so many phrases in English where we do that that the rule is meaningless. I don’t worry too much about misplaced commas, and I’m willing to overlook a lot of misspellings as possible typos.
But this is a very easy rule to learn, it is easy to check for and apply, and it is an important distinction.
Do you hire grammatically challenged people to do your programming and formatting? Does nobody check stuff before you make it part of your standard format? Is this the way youwish to present yourselves to the public?
For shame, Facebook. For shame.
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