Even as we spend every single day in the throes of cloying mutual admiration thanks to Facebook’s omnipresent, omnipotent “Like” button, comes an announcement that we could have a “Sympathise” button very soon on the social networking site. Lest all you obsessive compulsive fans of the “Like” go into a tizzy (I must plead guilty of ODing every now and then too), it’s only an alternative to certain situations tagged with negative emotions.
Guess what impact this would have on all of us. For starters, people are likely to get weepier on the site to score maximum “sympathises”. We’re sure to see an increasing number of work whiners: “Had the worrrrst day at work, my boss is an @$$#%!^”, health whiners: “Broke my arm/leg/nose/tailbone”, relationship whiners: “Just got dumped” as well the more generic: “My life succcckkkks” and “I haaate this” and the semi-illiterate yet extremely articulate: “Aaaaargh!” And habitual commenters will save themselves the trouble of keying in entire sentences (“You poor thing”, “Hang in there”, “Fingers crossed”, “Chin up”, “Take care”, “Oops ” and “Awww”) even if they’re composed of less than six syllables and go the convenient, button-pressing way. As for RIP messages referring to family, friends, pets or even celebrities, the “Sympathise” button could well be an adept replacement for well-meaning yet awkward condolences.
On the one hand, while the afore-mentioned dazzling innovation will make us lazier when it comes to expressing ourselves, another Internet giant’s spanking new banned list will probably have the opposite effect on us. The company in question is Google, and its latest Android phone’s built-in predictive dictionary is a blushing prude — making us see forbidden fruit in words such as “sex”, “condom”, “buxomly”, “bullshits” and “dung”. Of course, words such as “fallopian”, “sexism,” “bimbos”, “babes” and “catsuits” are also off bounds, making me wonder what exactly the company is trying to keep us away from. And when it comes to abbreviations such as “fwd” and “cmon”, acronyms such as “asap” and “tgif” and even onomatopoeia such as “heh”, “ho” and “hum”, what else can I say but “Ho hum!”?
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