What Facebook teaches me about language

I learned the difference between the words "quote" and "quotation" last night. As it turns out, quote should be used solely as a verb, while quotation is a noun. So you couldn’t have a Kanye West quote, but you could quote him. More specifics here.

This is one of those common misusages that has now become accepted, similar to the way octopi is now an acceptable plural for octopus.

I noticed this only because Facebook changed the Favorite Quotes field in their user profiles to Favorite Quotations. This reveals that I either have an eye for detail or just spend too much time on Facebook.

Still, I think Facebook reveals some discussion-worthy issues with the English language.

Another problem the site has confronted is the grammatical person. The issue stems from users who don’t define their gender, which forces the Mini-Feed to report, "Sally Shapiro posted new photos in their album Drunk Party Photos Part 10." This is grammatically incorrect. Even though "they" is gender-neutral, usage is strictly for the plural third person, not singular. Wikipedia documents the trouble in full. The right way would be to say, "Sally Shapiro posted new photos in his/her album," but of course, this looks silly.

Recently, I had a long, nerdy conversation about the development of language and the need for a singular third-person pronoun, even if that meant inventing one. Some writers, most notably Steven Levitt of the Freakonomics blog, default to "she" rather than "he/she." It’s not a bad alternative, but I think we can come up with a better answer. We also have to consider the movement of people who don’t want to specify a gender.

Anyway, back to Facebook. The site has over 80 million users worldwide, and if Zuckerberg and Co. implemented a new singular third-person pronoun – and it really doesn’t matter what that word is – they could have a hand in the way the English language evolves. It's hard to deny that the internet won't have a major effect on how we write and speak in the future.

Hopefully it’s the influence of Facebook rather than this site.