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

[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.