I didn’t know it was a problem until I read about it, and all of a sudden, I was mad. Facebook was forcing me to describe my status in terms of “Elly is…” and sometimes, that just doesn’t work. Required to describe my pithy thoughts in circumlocutory ways, I was happy to see Facebook groups dedicated to overturning this grammatical stranglehold.
And suddenly, the problem went away. Almost as quietly as the Beacon widget came for many unsuspecting users, the word “is” suddenly appeared in the highlighted text box when I clicked to change my status. Was it due to pressure from the advocacy groups? Or did Mark Zuckerberg get frustrated by his own site’s limitations? Who can say. All I know is, I naturally can’t think of a single status update that I want to post that doesn’t start with “Elly is” all of a sudden.
