by Becca Hafter

My mom is always saying things like “Oh, Theresa, oh no, I don’t think she is on Facebook.” Or, “All of my college friends have thankfully joined Facebook!” and it drives me crazy because Facebook is a noun that you possess, not a noun with which you engage. The word “Facebook” requires an indefinite article (a, an) or a possessive adjective (my, hers), not a preposition (on, in, above).

• “All of my friends have a Facebook.”

• “No, he’s too cool for Facebook, he doesn’t have a Facebook.”

• “She finally gave in and got a Facebook, but ugh, she restricts her viewable photos to profile pictures.”

I have tried to explain this grammatical distinction to my mother multiple times. She does not understand my argument. For her, Facebook is a website on which she interacts. It is a place over there. She must locate her self in relation to Facebook, a separate sphere from her ordinary existence. To me, “posting” or “liking” instantly connotes Facebook; she needs a preposition to explain to her audience where her “posting” or “liking” action took place. Her online presence occurs on specific forums and in specific places, spaces that must be explained. But that is so annoying!

Being on Facebook means currently using Facebook, being on Facebook messenger or actively engaging with the site in another way. If I am logged into Facebook chat, I might say that I’m “on Facebook.” The preposition is necessary to draw notice to the extra layer of Internet space that I am occupying. Because, duh, I am always on the Internet, but I am not always actively engaging in the Internet. For millennials, a generational descriptor which we are tasked with reclaiming, Facebook is the assumed space in which life occurs. Millennials do not need to use a preposition in conjuction with Facebook because the space is naturalized. My assumed existence is on the Internet and using Facebook. My Facebook. Which is the other grammatical issue at stake: possessive adjectives.

The difference in language expression stems from whether one has a sense of owning her Internet presence. We’re always talking about “my” Facebook and “my” Twitter and “my” Instagram. We “have” Vines and Tumblrs, too. (Tumblr is always “my Tumblr,” though of course Tumblr also sees its Tumblr fragments as individual Tumblrs, which are prone to decoration and remodeling in a way that Facebook is not. Twitter is the middle space on that continuum.) We verbally conceptualize our Internet presences as extensions of our physical possessions. When friends need to log onto their Facebooks on my computer, I ask them to open a tab in an incognito window. I might say: “My Facebook is open, don’t log me out.” Their slice of the Internet can’t supersede mine. Their Facebook and my Facebook can and should lay side to side, each contained in its own window. His Facebook. Her Facebook. Our Facebooks.

But Olds don’t have Facebooks. They’re “on” Facebook. The Olds need a preposition when they talk about Facebook because they do not automatically locate themselves on the Internet. But their word choice serves an additional function. Their constant verbal reification of operating in (on) a space that is not theirs but Facebook’s works pretty well to keep themselves aware of the fact that Facebook owns everything they post. This is something millennials love to disregard.

Even if the grownups know better about privacy and property rights, their grammar is still wrong.

The website Facebook has its roots in a physical college face book, a publication dating from at least 1983 in which freshman would have pictures for their peers and upperclassmen to judge. College face books were like high school yearbooks, but less well-intentioned. As college face books and high school yearbooks serve basically the same function, and college face books have the same name as Facebook and in my experience, the Olds are easily confused by this argument, let’s think about face books and Facebook like yearbooks. You would never be on a yearbook, you would have a yearbook. Your picture might be on a yearbook page, but the page and book themselves are nouns that need to be possessed, not modified with prepositions. You can have a yearbook. You can open up your yearbook to your yearbook page. You can check your yearbook page in your yearbook for your senior quote. Yearbooks and yearbooks pages get indefinite articles or possessive adjectives, just like Facebooks and Facebook profiles.

Unfortunately, for the Olds, these days the word “profile” is only implied after Facebook. People used to have Facebook profiles, but as Facebook rolled out more and shinier updates, this verbal reminder of the physical forebear of Facebook was phased out. The Olds are confused about proper Facebook grammar because they joined Facebook after profiles had disappeared. Prior to 2005, no one who was not a college student could have a Facebook. Prior to mid-2006, no one who was not either a high school or college student could have a Facebook. The Facebook profile, as it was originally conceptualized, lost prominence in 2006 when the “newsfeed upon log-in” style was introduced. My mom, a fairly early adopter, did not get a Facebook until 2008, still too late to have interacted with the original Facebook profile. (A telling description, packed with possessive determiners, of Facebook in 2007: “This was the era when your wall became a central component for your social life.”)

The Olds are missing the grammatical roots of Facebook content. They never experienced Facebook profiles that they could call their own. It’s not their fault that Facebook dropped the “profile” way before the Olds started oversharing about their Zumba classes on our newsfeeds.

So the Olds, usually right about grammar and using dictionaries and how to best clean your oven after dripping chicken fat all over the grate, are wrong about this one. And they should be, too! The Internet is the domain of millennials. Within the online universe, we have carved out places we call our own, places that we posses. These, of course, may be places where only we have the knowledge of the grammatical roots of the site. Millennials exist in a world where Facebook, and the Internet in general, is the unspoken medium in which we live our lives. Let the millennials win this one, Olds. You rarely let us win anything else.

Becca Hafter is an Awl summer reporter. Photo by Ambuj Saxena.

So if Nate Silver is Arcade Fire, Paul Krugman would be… Radiohead?

“Eight years ago, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft made a pass of the Earth on its way to Mercury. As it swept past our planet, it recorded a series of rearview images, giving us a stunning glimpse at what it looks like to depart our world forever.”
 — Except for the quiet fade to black symbolizing the cessation of my consciousness and, therefore, existence, this is pretty much exactly what my most fervent fantasies look like.

“I will never watch Jeopardy again after today. The fact that they denied it was the last straw for me. Goodbye Jeopardy.”

“The all-American hamburger: It makes you think of herds of cattle, the great plains, family-run farms…”
 — Hmmm. That is not exactly what springs to my mind when someone mentions hamburger. Anyway, here’s five minutes of “news” about fake meat, which is comical because you really only need about 45 seconds before you’re all, “Ugggh, gross, get it away.” If your choice is between feces and Science, lunch is going to be a drag either way.

“Harlan Coben, the best-selling thriller writer, was 9 years old, another Newark refugee in Livingston, when he met Christie on a Little League field, the future governor a chunky kid in a catcher’s get-up coming toward him, saying his full name: Harlan Coben — Hi, I’m Chris Christie. ‘What 9-year-old does that?’ Coben said to me 42 years later. New Jersey then was barely the Jersey we know now, but by the time Christie was a teenager and a Bruce Springsteen fan of extreme emotion and attachment, the persona of the state was beginning to take hold.”

“Groh is the owner of Joe’s Steaks + Soda Shop at 6030 Torresdale Ave., and if that doesn’t ring a bell, here’s the name it used until March 31: Chink’s Steaks, a Wissinoming landmark since 1949. Seem familiar now? I doubt many, if any, of Chink’s customers connected the name with a racial slur. The steak shop was named by founder Sam “Chink” Sherman, who got the nickname when he was a kid due to his almond shaped eyes. You can argue whether his friends meant it as an Asian slur or a sidewalk description. America was, rightly or wrongly, less sensitive about such things then.”
 — It’s a tough one, sure, but I’m gonna go with “wrongly.” Anyway, guess what happened when this guy changed the name of his restaurant to make it unracist? Perhaps it will sharpen your prognostic prowess if I inform you that the establishment is located in Philadelphia.

I can’t keep track of where we stand with MGMT these days. Backlash? Post-backlash? Relash? I mean, I liked that “Time To Pretend” song, and “Kids” was fine too. I had other plans when their next record came out, I can’t remember what they were now, so I was absent that day, but it couldn’t have been awful, could it have? Maybe it could, I don’t know. As I said, I was otherwise engaged. Also, I am aging rather rapidly, so perhaps my tastes are less than fully aligned with those of the zeitgeist. Anyway, here’s a new one. I’m not saying it’s exactly what Marc Bolan would be doing were he young and alive today, but I’m also not saying that it isn’t. He was a weird cat, Bolan, always zigging when he should have zagged, so who knows what kind of crazy crap he’d be putting out these days. Maybe it would sound just like the new MGMT single, which, funnily enough, sits right atop these words. Enjoy. [Via]

“I feel like I’m in Montauk four years ago.”
 — This New Yorker — visiting the Rockaways from the East Village — says so much about two different scenes, and her participation in both, with such remarkable concision that one can’t help but admire it.

Here are a number of things to do and one not to do!