there's one thing i still don't understand. (cue CLUE: "One thing?")

[fox]

People have been talking about CEO Man's assertion w/r/t interests, and how it doesn't match up with reality.  He says:

Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of “I like x”, “I’m in favor of x” or “I support x”.

In fact, as many, many (many) people have pointed out, the "other places" are unclear, and in the "instructions" for profiles the guidelines -- what I'd have been more likely to call "advice" -- the words "support" and "in favor of" do not appear.  The text is as follows:

Short single-word phrases are best.

Rule of thumb:  You should be able to put the interest in the sentence "I like _____".

When referring to nouns, use the plural form for consistency, e.g.: "I like DVDs" instead of "I like DVD".

GOOD Example:  biking, snow skiing, computers, dvds, mp3s, cheese

BAD Example:  I like lots of bands and watching movies and talking to friends and going to clubs.  That sort of stuff goes in your bio below.

Okay, this? to me? is advice -- instruction, even -- about style.  Short single-word phrases* are best, so don't give us complete sentences.  In fact, your interests want to be just the predicates of simple declarative sentences.  If you like DVDs, don't tell us "I like DVDs"; tell us "DVDs".

I cannot be the only person to whom it never even occurred to look at any of this as advice about content.  (In fact I know I'm not, because ellen_fremedon and I talked about it as we were leaving work today.)  It seems that BB/6A/LJ had in mind that the "instruction" "You should be able to put the interest in the sentence 'I like _____'." meant "Don't tell us about things you're interested in if you don't like or understand them, such as diabetes or wormhole physics."  Which makes that the one bit of content-related advice in a whole stack of style-related advice, so the fact that NOBODY ON THE INTERNETS made that assumption shouldn't have been all that surprising.  There has got to be someone in that office who writes better than BB does, who could have pointed out to him that One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other.  Unless it never occurred to any of them, either, because WHY ON EARTH would you restrict interests to only things a person liked -- which is where everyone else's argument comes in.

The fact that this is how both ellen_fremedon and I found ourselves objecting to that snippet of CEO Man's reasoning may, I suppose, be a professional hazard.

In other news, the glasses that I was ordering at the time all this went splodey? are now ready for me to pick up, apparently.  I like that.  Sort of a full-circle thing.  :-)  (And, hey, they said it would be about a week and it was two days, so total bonus.)

*whatever that means, to a layperson; I know what a single-word phrase is, but I also know that to most non-linguists a "phrase" is more or less defined as "a collection of words", so "single-word phrase" must sound a little oxymoronic -- and anyway, how long can a single-word phrase be, really?, so was there a need to specify "short"?  ... welcome to my mind.

Comments

[gblvr.livejournal.com]

Not a professional hazzard, as meri_oddities and I had the same conversation; cruisedirector and I also talked about that bit of the apology. One of the points we discussed is that "like" is a loaded word around LJ, in the same way that "friend list" is loaded -- the meaning isn't the same as it would be in the real world.

Also, I've looked all over LJ, and not found "I support x" or "I'm in favor of x" anywhere....

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Not disagreeing with you -- but that's still a content issue, the loadedness of "like". I don't care about the meaning of the word in LJ or the real world, because to me, "The interest should be able to complete the sentence I like ___", in that set of instructions, means "The interest should be able to complete a simple declarative sentence". The verb in that sentence was never remotely relevant to me.

[gblvr.livejournal.com]

I'm sure we're working towards the same point, but since I'm not able to rip apart grammar like you guys do, it probably doesn't sound like it. I do think it's silly to believe that every interest any one could ever have could be reduced to a simple declarative sentence; this is what you're saying as well, right?

(And yeah, part of the silliness for me is the word 'like', which implies that all of a person's interests are something they enjoy.)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Sort of. What I'm saying is that I took that instruction to be about how the interest should look, rather than what it should be. Right? "Short, single-word phrases," such as might complete the sentence "I [verb] [noun-thing]." I understood all the instructions to be related to one another, and all about short phrases in the plural (where applicable). As resonant8 demonstrates, the declarative sentences don't always stay so simple, for what we've listed as our interests, but it's still possible to make them quite simple, to render the interests in a way that could fit that structure, which is what I thought the instruction was saying.

The silliness of the word "like" and its semantic implications is a whole separate thing, when it comes to that. :-)

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I totally read it exactly the same way you did. I like slash, I enjoy hating (and discussing how much I hate) slow drivers, I'm very worried about global warming -- all valid interests, if you read that as an instruction about how to phrase your interest rather than how you're allowed to feel about it.

[acejillian.livejournal.com]

And while I did read your entire statement and agreed with it...

I am stuck on the squee for the Clue quote.

I'm going to go home and sleep with my wife.