Why does Facebook use bad grammar?

Posted on December 29th, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc..

I logged into facebook today to be greeted by this message: Christopher xxx changed their profile picture. Changed their profile picture? Did he suddenly develop multiple personalities? Has he asexually divided into multiple people? Last I checked, he was a single person. The pronoun “their” should never be used as a singular gender-neutral pronoun when it can be avoided. In this scenario, facebook already has our gender. It would be quite simple to add a database lookup to use the appropriate pronoun. This is one of those really simple grammar mistakes that are so easily avoided. This is in the same league as using “good” as an adverb.

Come on guys, you can do gooder than that.

5 comments.

Chris

Comment on December 30th, 2006.

It’s probably because that person didn’t have their gender in the system.

Tim

Comment on January 2nd, 2007.

Said person would be a stooge, and it still doesn’t excuse poor grammar.

Chris

Comment on January 6th, 2007.

So your solution would be to:

a) Mandate that everyone provide a gender?
b) Use “his or her” everywhere?

Tim

Comment on January 7th, 2007.

“Chris has an updated profile picture!”

Or have a database of names that guesses gender. If Chris wants to be known as a female, she shouldn’t have abbreviated Christina or she should have specified her gender.

Chris

Comment on January 10th, 2007.

http://www.xkcd.com/c145.html

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