Tag: secondary school

The absolute trash fire that is Facebook

I remember first hearing about Facebook. I was in secondary school at the time. I think at that time it was still exclusive – you could only create an account if you were at a certain educational institution.

Making it exclusive in that way certainly worked to make the site enticing. When finally we could create accounts, me and everyone I knew did so. We’d all already had accounts on Bebo and MySpace, of course – a story almost every millennial will tell you – but that’d never really gone anywhere.

Facebook was so different in the early years. It seems bizarre, looking back to 2009-2010, that it did mostly consist of talking – in a very indirect way – with your friends – that was mostly who and what you saw on there. And it was such a simple website too. (At least, that’s how I remember it. I think there were groups and direct messages at the time, but for the most part what you saw when you went to the site was your ‘wall’.)

Having a Facebook account wasn’t an essential part of life at the time, but nor was it an irritant.

Jump forwards in time to now. My goodness is Facebook an absolute trash fire now. The site is barely useable. I mean that in two senses – firstly in the sense that the site breaks – A LOT – and secondly in the sense that the site is filled with a blistering concoction of useless, unrelated, and inconvenient features.

I mean, let me go to the main page (I can’t remember what they’re calling it nowadays – the ‘news feed’? – I don’t know). I am immediately presented with about a thousand different things, absolutely none of which I want. The first thing I see is a post from a page that I don’t follow and have never followed and which none of my friends are following. The reason I don’t follow it is because I’m not interested in it and this post is shit. This post is the most generic piece of ‘content’ I’ve ever seen – derivative, banal – it’s not even formatted correctly. Why are you pushing this shit, Facebook?

I scroll down, and the next thing I see is – oh – another post from a page I don’t follow – no, wait – it’s from a group I’m not in. For some reason Facebook has both ‘pages’ and ‘groups’, even though they seem to do the exact same fucking things. This utterly demented post is showing me what is quite obviously an American McMansion, but describing it as some kind of architectural gem. What the fuck is this, Facebook? Is this rage-bait? Are you showing this to people because you know they’ll comment about how ugly the house is? Why are you even showing me this in the first place – neither I nor any of my friends are in this Facebook group, and I have never shown any interest in being in this group.

I scroll down again. What’s next? Oh, it’s some shorts videos. Fantastic, Facebook – because I haven’t been bombarded with those enough from every other website. One of the videos is about cutting a fish. Look, one of those is interesting, Facebook – two is excessive. Another seems to be about making boiled sweets. Again, Facebook, one is interesting, two is excessive.

The next item? Another post from a page I don’t follow. The one after that? An advert from a clothing brand. And it goes on, and on, and on. More posts from things I don’t follow; more shorts videos (or whatever stupid name they call them on Facebook); more covert adverts.

And what if I divert my gaze away from the endless diarrhœa? On the left there is a list of … things? ‘Memories’ is one of them. I’ve never clicked that. I don’t need to, Facebook, I have memories in my head. ‘Saved’ – I’ve never clicked that, either – I don’t think I’ve ever ‘saved’ anything on here. ‘Video’ – what even is that? All video? Or just short videos? If I want videos, Facebook, I’ll go to YouTube. Obviously. ‘Feeds’ – isn’t that what I’m already on, Facebook? If I click on ‘See More’, the list becomes even more bewildering. ‘Climate Science Centre’ – why the fuck does Facebook have a ‘Climate Science Centre’? What even is that? ‘Meta Quest 3S’ – I don’t know what that is, Facebook – why is it there? ‘Ray-Ban Meta’. What?! I just – I don’t even know what I’m looking at, and why is any of this stuff here? Why is any of this stuff considered to be important enough to have on the main page?

Below all of that is a list of ‘shortcuts’ – possibly the only useful thing on the page. On the opposite side is a list of ‘contacts’ – don’t you mean my actual friends, Facebook? Or have we given up on that word? It would be nice if the list were ordered in a way that wasn’t entirely random. There’s also a message button in the top right – with a lightning bolt through it. It’s not entirely clear how this is different from the list of contacts – they seem to do the same things.

That’s just the main page. The experience of it is like pouring battery acid in my eyes and then going on a guided tour of the Museum of Fresh Turds – with a tactile exhibit. What is any of this for, Facebook? Why would I want any of this? WHO is it for?! Is anyone actually using this?

You might be wondering, at this point, why I still have a Facebook account if I hate the site so much. I suppose it’s just out of the belief that, if I delete my account, it would be easier for a scammer to impersonate me on the site. I mean, that’s it – that’s why. How low Facebook has fallen for that to be the only reason left to keep an account on there open.

Sometimes I think that another reason to keep it open is so that I can contact old friends on there should I need to. But actually I think most of my friends on there have long since stopped using Facebook altogether.

(I also keep my Facebook account so that I can promote various things I do – books and videos and the like – on there. But I’ve never been very good at this – in large part because the site is so ungainly to use.)

I won’t go through every page of the website and examine all the ways in which it is shit – suffice to say that every other page of the site is filled with problems too. Over the years, I’ve tried using Facebook ads for various things. I have never persisted with them for very long – in large part because the ads manager system was just completely broken – I honestly don’t know how anyone used it. Pages would fail to load; links would lead in loops; nothing was where you’d expect it to be. This was a few years ago, but I honestly don’t know how Facebook has ever managed to make any money with such a broken ads platform.

I think that Facebook has suffered from a problem that many technology companies suffer from after a time. You see, everyone who works at a technology company wants to put their mark on the technology they create. They want to have their feature – the thing that they added – it was their idea or they implemented it. It’s a status thing – they can forever boast about how they were the person who added that thing to the technology. The result is, over time, such pieces of technology inflate with features that are not useful or necessary. Facebook reeks of this. Elon Musk takes plenty of flak for wanting to make Twitter some kind of ‘everything app’, but Facebook has already been trying to do this for years, it seems.

Oh you know what, to finish, I’ll roast another part of the site. Managing a Facebook page is an absolute fucking nightmare. Every time I try to do anything for my ‘Benjamin T. Milnes’ page on Facebook, I just give up. I am just presented with a bewildering selection of crap that I don’t want.

When I go to my page, I’m asked a question: ‘How healthy is your Page?’. I don’t care Facebook. Not least because one of the options in this box is to ‘Link your WhatsApp account’. Are you insane, Facebook? Why would I want to do that?!

There’s a link that will take me to my ‘Professional dashboard’, whatever that is. Let’s see. Ah, here’s a new page – never seen this one before (clearly the masterpiece of another demented ‘product manager’ at Facebook). The first box has the heading ‘Weekly challenges’. No other information is presented with it – just a progress bar saying ‘0%’. Fucking marvellous, Facebook.

On the left there are some options. Apparently there’s an ‘Inspiration hub’ – whatever the fuck that is. I can ‘Earn achievements for creating reels’. Oh really, Facebook? What are these ‘achievements’ you speak of? Unless it’s money, I don’t really give a shit. Under ‘Tools to try’, I can click ‘Stars’. Oh wow, Facebook, ‘Stars’?! How magical! How special!

I haven’t the faintest idea what this shit is, and I don’t care, but let’s click on it anyway. Clicking on it takes me to a page titled ‘Monetisation’ – right, Facebook, because it was obvious that that’s where the link would lead. I’m presented with a ‘Status’, where I’m told that I have ‘No monetisation breaches’. Well fan-bloody-tastic, Facebook.

Under that is, again, ‘Tools to try’, where it says ‘Stars’ again. This was the wrong page to take me to, Facebook – make your links work properly, you absolute morons. Here, at least, there is a brief description of what ‘Stars’ are. They are a kind of pretend currency that Facebook has made up. In a million years, Facebook, I would never have guessed that that’s what they were.

And by this point, I’m completely lost. I could not tell you what part of the Facebook website I have found myself on.

Meanwhile, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a post from an actual friend on this site.

No, the comma does *not* always go before the closing quote mark – Logical Punctuation

‘The comma always goes before the closing quote mark.’

I’ve heard this a number of times over the last 7 years or so – mostly, but certainly not exclusively, from Americans.

And I had heard it in life before that too. I can’t remember exactly when I first heard it – I think it was possibly in secondary school, from one of my secondary school English teachers. But I do remember that when I first heard it, I immediately thought ‘That’s silly.’.

Consider the following sentence.

‘I think I like pears more than I like apples.’

Now let’s imagine that this is a line said by someone – a character in a novel, perhaps. Now, the ‘he said’ / ‘she said’ could be put at the end.

‘”I think I like pears more than I like apples.”, she said.’

Or we could split the sentence and put the ‘he said’ / ‘she said’ in the middle.

‘”I think”, she said, “I like pears more than I like apples.”‘

This illustrates the problem. That first comma in the line above – those who say ‘The comma always goes before the closing quote mark.’ would have it go before the first closing double quote mark – immediately after the word ‘think’.

But I think this is ridiculous. That comma is not part of the original sentence – what this person is actually saying. It is not part of the ‘inner sentence’ – it is part of the ‘outer sentence’. For clarity, I’ve written the same text again below, but coloured the ‘inner sentence’ green and the ‘outer sentence’ blue.

‘”I think“, she said, “I like pears more than I like apples.“‘

The double quote marks are the demarcations between the inner and outer sentences. You can join together all of the separately-quoted parts of the inner sentence to get back the original thing being quoted.

If we were to follow the ‘The comma always goes before the closing quote mark.’ rule, however, we would have:

‘”I think,“ she said, “I like pears more than I like apples.“‘

This is clearly less elegant. The inner and outer sentence are now mixed together across the quote marks.

So I would say that the correct rule is: only that which is part of the quote goes within the quote marks.

Now sure, commas are for adding structure to written language – we do not speak them. (Well, they sort-of represent pauses in spoken language, but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule, and they’re better understood as making clauses easier to recognise in written text.) But that structure is still either of the inner sentence or the outer sentence, and putting a comma in the inner sentence when it’s actually part of the outer sentence can change the meaning.

I learned a while ago that my preferred style of using punctuation is called logical punctuation. And apparently the other style – the comma-before-the-quote-mark style – is known as typographer’s punctuation, or something like that. I’m not too sure about these names. ‘Logical punctuation’ is a bit grandiose, even if it is more logical, and I don’t know why typographers would be expected to be so slapdash in their approach to punctuation. But apparently these are terms that are used.

I’ve also seen it said that logical punctuation is the British style, and the other way is the American style. I’ve certainly heard Americans advocate for the comma-before-the-quote-marks style more often. I’ve heard Britons insist upon it too, though whether this is just because of the cultural backwash we get from America, I can’t say.

But regardless of what the best names for these styles are, and regardless of whether the Britons or the Americans use one style more, it is better to use logical punctuation.

The main argument I hear in favour of the American style is ‘It looks better.’. There’s just something about the lower punctuation mark followed by the higher one that looks better than the inverse. While aesthetics are very important in language, to some extent (only some) what you like is just what you get used to over time, and aesthetics should generally not be at the expense of function and semantics. (There are exceptions, of course, but generally.)

Some would say that my approach is perhaps the product of a mathematical mind. (I am a physicist by training.) You can certainly see the appeal of logical punctuation to a mathematical mind – logical punctuation perfectly mimics the way brackets work in mathematics. However, this is somewhere where the penetrating orderliness of mathematics should influence human language. Using logical punctuation allows you to avoid a great many problems that arise if you try to use the American style. The American style generally applies not just to commas, but to all punctuation. Consider the following sentence.

‘What did he say after “You’re not supposed to do that?”‘

The typographer’s style advocates for putting that question mark before the closing double quote mark, as I’ve written it above. But is the question mark part of the inner sentence or the outer sentence? Or both? You can’t tell – but it changes the meaning. If the question mark is part of the inner sentence, the person being quoted is asking a question. If it’s not part of the inner sentence, the person being quoted is making a statement.

This is clearly a problem, and if you try to follow the American style for an entire book, you will run into variations of this problem over and over again – with no way to be both consistent and always unambiguous. (You might think the problem won’t come up very often, but it does – it comes up A LOT.)

Logical punctuation solves this easily. If the inner sentence is a statement, you write:

‘What did he say after “You’re not supposed to do that.”?’

and if it’s a question, you write:

‘What did he say after “You’re not supposed to do that?”?’

Some people might find it visually clumsy to have all those punctuation marks bundled together like that. But again, the aesthetics you can adjust to if you just get used to it – but the semantic issues of the typographer’s style cannot be cleanly resolved.

I hope that logical punctuation becomes more popular. Britons seem to be split on it. But I think it’s an easy rule to remember: only that which is part of the quote goes in the quote marks.

Why I’m going back to B.C. / A.D.

When I first found out about B.C.E. / C.E. – standing for ‘Before the Common Era’ and ‘Common Era’ – which I think was towards the end of primary school or sometime during secondary school, I immediately found them compelling. I’d say for most of the time between 2006 and 2023, I used B.C.E. / C.E. exclusively instead of B.C. / A.D.. But now I’m going back.

You have to remember that Christianity in England was different in the late 90s and early 2000s. Nowadays, Christianity is absent from most parts of English life (if you’re an atheist like me) – a result, in part, of New Atheism (of which I was a small part). But 20-25 years ago it was much more present. More people were Christian, and they were more vocal about it – more willing to mention it in casual conversation; more willing to make their allegiance to it known.

I was an atheist from a very early age – possibly six, seven, eight years old. It was very obvious to me, early on, that there was no particular reason to believe in the existence of the Christian god over, say, the Greek gods. I recognised it straight away as mythology.

I also have a rebellious streak, and a great disdain for condescension and that kind of ‘kid-talk’ voice that bad primary school teachers do. The Christians I encountered in the late 90s and early 2000s were extremely condescending, and also quite bossy and expectant. So I found Christianity to not only be incorrect, but also detestable.

This is why I liked B.C.E. / C.E.. As an atheist, it seemed nonsensical to write an abbreviation meaning ‘Before Christ’ when I don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was Christ (i.e., the son of a god), or to write an abbreviation of ‘Anno Domini’, meaning ‘in the year of our Lord’, when I don’t believe that Jesus was or is Lord. I also disliked that our year-numbering system was connected to – what I saw as – a very annoying religion filled with quite annoying people.

B.C.E. / C.E., on the other hand, seemed perfectly clear and neutral – abstract even. ‘The Common Era’ – a term that seemed to make sense given that people right across the world used this numbering system – it really was the common era. I was also drawn to the symmetry of the abbreviations – both containing ‘C.E.’. It seems elegant. That’s the physicist / programmer in me – we are drawn to symmetry and the simplification it brings.

So for many years I consistently used B.C.E. / C.E. every time I needed to write it. But now I’m changing back.

There are several reasons for this. Primary among them is that I abhor the obscuration of history and the loss of tradition. I have always abhorred these things – from a very young age. This isn’t a new trait. (It is something that has long set me apart from a lot of the people on the political left, who generally see no value in tradition – be it national tradition or even local or personal tradition.) And the reality is, the B.C.E. / C.E. system uses the same numbers as the B.C. / A.D. system – numbers which, for centuries, were used to denote how many years had passed since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. (Whether or not they are accurate is a different matter – that is the meaning they had for centuries.) If any young person, new to all of this, were to ask ‘Why are the year numbers the numbers that they are? Why is the current year 2024 and not 3748?’, you would have to explain that they are based on the number of years thought to have passed since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. So changing the words doesn’t actually remove the meaning at all – the meaning is still there. All changing the words does is try to obscure the origin of the system – it just tries to obscure a historical fact. And I don’t like that.

Also, as time has gone on, I have gotten a greater and greater adoration for old things. I used to hate old buildings – including churches. They always stank of old building – and it’s quite an oppressive smell. This was true of churches, but also think of old pavilions on village cricket greens or football fields, or municipal libraries built in the 70s and fitted with scratchy, grey carpet tiles. Somehow they all smelled the same – of old. And they were cold – both in temperature and in lighting. I was thoroughly a modernist in this regard – I like super-modern buildings made out of shiny steel and huge glass windows.

But this was before I had really encountered the horrors of brutalism. Brutalism will make you rethink your entire attitude to modern buildings. And really, even the things that aren’t brutalist that have been built over the last 50-70 years or so are also, often, just horrid. They are ugly, stale, corporate, and bureaucratic.

Nowadays, when I go to a new town or city, the place I want to visit is the cathedral or the biggest church. They are by far the nicest-looking buildings, and the ones with the most history. I love wandering through the parts of them where all of the in-church graves and memorials are, and reading things that were carved into the wall hundreds of years ago. (It’s why Westminster Abbey is so much fun – I’d recommend to everyone to go there.)

I adore the things that have lasted for centuries – buildings, statues, artwork, and also conventions, such as B.C. / A.D.. These things connect you to the past – a past, and a society, in which all of your ancestors lived. By writing B.C. / A.D., you are participating in a system that thousands upon thousands of people have used before you. By using it, you are joining them in upholding an ancient tradition. You are passing on what was passed down to you.

And in the end, the literal meaning doesn’t really matter to me. Simply writing B.C. / A.D. – or even the full wording – has no chance of changing my mind about the existence of a supernatural being. Atheism (for me, at least) is not so flimsy.

(As an aside, I did previously wonder whether there was a technical reason to switch to B.C.E. / C.E. – that being the ‘blip’ caused by the switch between Old Style and New Style dates resulting from the change from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. The B.C. / A.D. system, being defined from a time 2024 years ago, could be used to refer to either an Old Style or a New Style date. The B.C.E. / C.E. system – I thought – was defined from now backwards, and thus could only ever refer to a New Style date. This would have made the Common Era system more mathematically rigorous. However, I later found that this wasn’t true – B.C.E. / C.E. is just a wholesale swap-out for B.C. / A.D., with no mathematical fix implied. What rubbish. If you’re going to make the change, at least fix the mathematics of it.)

B.C.E. / C.E. are cold – devoid of all meaning and richness. They are dreary – the kind of dreariness exhibited by brown glass windows, balding civil servants, and – worst of all places – business parks (a kind of dreariness that women in HR dream of inflicting upon their prisoner-employees).

So I’m going back to B.C. / A.D.. In fact I might quite often write out the full thing: before Christ and anno Domini. In fact in fact, I might go as far as to write out their full Latin and longer variants: ante Christum natum and anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi. After all, I do enjoy writing conventions that seem unusually lengthy and detailed.

Apostrophic Abbreviations

I remember learning about apostrophes in primary and secondary school. I remember learning that they could be used to indicate possession with the possessive s – for example, ‘Ben’s blog’ – and I remember learning that apostrophes were also used in abbreviations – they denoted letters that had been omitted to make two words shorter.

This is something we all learn in school. But I think something else we learn at the same time is that there is a set of words that are abbreviated in this way (words like I’ve and you’re) and that that’s it – no other words can be abbreviated in this way.

But in the last two years or so, I realised that there really isn’t anything to stop me from using apostrophes to abbreviate more words. (It might not be considered grammatically correct by a number of grammar and spelling aficionados, but I don’t think there’s any point sticking to a rule of grammar if the rule adds nothing to the language.) There are words that I abbreviate when I speak them – sometimes if I want to write a sentence, but convey the same meaning as if I had spoken it, I want to abbreviate the same words.

So I have started doing this – I have started abbreviating other words – beyond the standard set – and here are some of the ones that I use:

  • I’d’ve – I would have
  • We’d’ve – We would have
  • You’d’ve – You would have
  • He’d’ve – He would have
  • She’d’ve – She would have
  • They’d’ve – They would have
  • Who’d’ve – Who would have
  • What’ve – What have
  • When’ve – When have
  • Where’ve – Where have
  • Why’ve – Why have
  • to’ve – to have
  • Couldn’t’ve – Could not have
  • Wouldn’t’ve – Would not have
  • Shouldn’t’ve – Should not have
  • Won’t’ve – Will not have
  • I’ll’ve – I will have
  • We’ll’ve – We will have
  • You’ll’ve – You will have
  • He’ll’ve – He will have
  • She’ll’ve – She will have
  • They’ll’ve – They will have
  • Who’ll’ve – Who will have
  • There’re – There are
  • Where’re – Where are
  • Who’re – Who are
  • Y’know – You know
  • D’y’know – Do you know
  • J’know – Do you know
  • D’y’think – Do you think
  • J’think – Do you think
  • ‘snot – It’s not
  • ‘salso – It’s also

In this list there are words which have two apostrophes in them where I’ve smashed together three words. I find this to be delightfully absurd. Two apostrophes is altogether too many apostrophes to have in a word – much the same way that twelve sides is too many sides for a £1 coin to have – and that’s why I think it’s brilliant (and I like the new £1 coin too).

Some of these words even start with apostrophes – also a lot of fun.

It doesn’t save any time writing words like this – I write fewer characters but I spend more time thinking about when to type the apostrophes. I use these abbreviations in order to make what I write more similar to what I say. They can prevent something I write from seeming too formal and stiff.

Microsoft Word complains when I do this, of course, as does my phone when I use these abbreviations in text messages. But I have a lot of idiosyncrasies in my writing, and I’ve long since ignored Word’s opinion of it. (‘Yes Word, I do in fact WANT that line to be a sentence fragment.’)