We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Alright, so I’ve decided to do something new with the way I write–or edit, actually. And I think this is a good idea for a lot of writers to do. Here goes:
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I’m actually doing the same thing, only for a different sort of mistakes. When I’m done, I’m going to go back and look for things like “there was”, “seemed like”, “…”, or “suddenly” because I overuse all of them.
Where did you learn that “took a breath” is grammatically incorrect? I’ve always thought that breath is a noun, breathe is a verb, and that breaths is the plural form of breath.
See, exactly what I mean. I had them backwards in the post. They’ll be fixed momentarily :P. Thanks :D.
Take for instance the word “breathe”. Sometimes I screw up and use “breath” instead.
Are those supposed to be switched also? And aren’t you going to give them my awesome explanation about nouns and verbs (versus your previous one about singular and plural, which seems to have vanished)?
I don’t think I ever made the breath/breathe mistake, because I read rants about it long before I ever started writing enough to make many mistakes.
But you know — I still can’t figure out how to spell “opportunity”, and I don’t remember what “arbitrary” means, but I throw it around anyway. Sometimes I mix up there/their, but I always catch it when I read the second-time-through. At least … I hope I do. And I didn’t learn about the piqued/peaked thing until just recently.
There are bugs in my hair (yes, literally), so I’m going to take this as a sign to go to bed.
Haha. Okay, breath is a noun, breathe is a verb. You breath or take a breath. He breathed, she breathes, and they all breathe. Everyone took a breath or takes a breath. Everyone breathes.
There :P. Yes, I had a complete idiot moment earlier, which is my exact point regarding that darned word. It’s a weird word that I just screw up on for some reason.
I don’t make the mistake on purpose usually. This post aside, I generally will write and leave out the e, or just tack it on randomly, and if I’m not paying close attention during editing I won’t catch it.
Arbitrary = based on individual preference (such as an impulse). So an arbitrary decision, one based on an individual preference rather than one decided by the collective :P. Which is how everything apart from politics is generally decided.
Thanks. -definition slips out of head-
I’ll just keep on using the word arbitrarily and hope I’m using it right. Because that’s what I’ve been doing.
I don’t know what’s wrong with you people – I never screw anything up 😉
Kidding! My biggest problem is who/whom and I’ll probably never actually figure that one out because the explanation is so convoluted that it hurts. Even when I thought I had gotten it, I hadn’t. Some editing sites will have lists of common errors. A Writer’s Reference, by Diana Hacker, is also a fantastic resource for common screw-ups/switch-ups.
Common error lists are good reference points, but I think it’s useful to be aware of which errors you personally commit the most. Those are ones you can weed out in the editing process quickly with a simple search through your document. Hopefully with practice the errors would disappear…or not.
But who/whom is certainly one of those annoying word conjugations.