I would like to share a quote I just found, pulled from People.com.

“In response to Hansen’s Tweet, Stephanie Tweeted, ‘No josh Hansen u were dumped stop acting like a child.  Keep star [expletive] ur (sic) way into Hollywood.  Now pls GO AWAY!!!!!!’”

Now let’s break down all the things I find interesting about the grammar.  (Oh balls, you say.  Now he’s going to spend the rest of the time talking about grammar.)

First of all, the word “tweet” is capitalized, which is something I’ve never seen before.  ”Stephanie Tweeted.”  This is odd.  We don’t capitalize “said” or “wrote,” which are the comparable words for an activity like tweeting before two years ago.  Why did People decide it should be capitalized?  It’s not a proper noun.  We don’t even capitalize “googled,” as in, “I googled a recipe for artichoke dip, but it came out all lumpy.”  

And let’s not forget that the New York Times, the longstanding gold standard of journalism (according to me), decided that “tweet” isn’t a word at all and shouldn’t be used in the paper (outside of ornithological contexts, of course).  People Online apparently disagrees — not only is “Tweet” acceptable English, it’s important enough to be CAPITALIZED!

Second: Twitter is rife with “internet speak,” which is that annoying thing that happened when kids decided AOL Instant Messenger was a casual-enough medium to relax the spelling of most words.  This isn’t new — it was happening when I was 12.  It’s as old as the internet.  But text messages (and now Twitter) actually gave it some practicality — when you’re limited to 140 characters, it occasionally makes sense to type things like “u” instead of “you” or “ur” instead of “your,” or “you’re.”  (Still a pet peeve, but I understand why.  Sometimes).

The interesting thing about this quote was the use of (sic), which is reporter shorthand for “I know this is wrong — it’s not my fault, it’s a direct quote.”  (It’s actually supposed to be [sic] — in brackets, not quotes.  But hey, that’s not their only mistake.)

As you’ll notice in the above quote, (sic) is used precisely once: after “ur,” as in, “keep star fucking ur way into Hollywood.”  I find this incredibly amusing, because having it in there once (and only once) invites a lot of questions.  If I wrote the Stephanie Pratt Twitter Incident article, I would probably have enough faith in my readership that I wouldn’t include the [sic] at all — everyone can identify internet-speak at this point, and the fact we know she’s “Tweeting” it adds to the context.  However, if my editor insisted I include the [sic], the quote should really read:

“No josh [sic] Hansen u [sic] were dumped stop acting like a child.  Keep star [expletive] ur [sic] way into Hollywood.  Now pls [sic] GO AWAY!!!!!!”

I bolded them to make it a little clearer.

However, this article’s author, the venerable Dahvi Shira (according to the byline), only felt the need to include the third of four.  What does that mean?  Does that mean she (he?) doesn’t understand that first names need to be capitalized, that “u” is not actually a word, and that pls is not how you spell please?  

Because that’s the impression I’m getting.  By including one without the others, you are tacitly admitting that the rest are okay.  And that it’s okay to use six exclamation points at the end of a sentence, which is absolutely not true.

What the fuck is going on here?  Do PUBLISHED REPORTERS not know English anymore?  Or do they not know what [sic] means?  

Or does it really just mean that People can no longer officially count as news?  Because I personally find that last one very upsetting.