As students grow wary that public-safety officers may be browsing their Facebook profiles, officials at Princeton University have moved to assuage concerns about social-network snooping. Although Facebook is by no means private, the officials say, campus police won’t be allowed to skim the site for evidence of upcoming parties or of students’ bad behavior. Instead, the officers will use the site only to aid ongoing investigations.
Students at Princeton had complained that several public-safety officers had created their own Facebook accounts and misleadingly billed themselves as undergraduates. (The Daily Princetonian)
For more on campus police officers’ use of Facebook, see a story from The Chronicle by Brock Read.
10 Responses to On Facebook, Policing the Police
Ambarish Sridharanarayanan - January 19, 2012 at 1:57 am
One of the best stories about automated sentence generation is at:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
laurencejgillis - January 19, 2012 at 7:42 am
Dare I ask the linguistic history of the name “Pootwattle”?
threejs - January 19, 2012 at 10:30 am
What a hoot! On the serious side, it goes to the sort of thing Sokal was doing with The Hoax. Edwin Newman, the newscaster, once observed that the increasing use of jargon hides meaning instead of creating it.
Laura Payne - January 19, 2012 at 10:59 am
I will never get to work today.
usaret - January 19, 2012 at 5:51 pm
This takes me back to a couple of the papers I heard at MLA last week–now I know why so many papers sound similar–the Pootwattle Collaboration!
cbobbitt - January 19, 2012 at 6:25 pm
The verb “pootle” shows up in Margaret Atwood’s most recent book (IN OTHER WORLDS) in its present participial form. The OED actually defines it: “To move or travel in a leisurely manner.” The first citation is from D. E. Westlake. “Poot,” another verb of recent vintage, is another possibility. Again, from the OED, “To break wind. Also: to defecate.”
mikegrubb - January 20, 2012 at 1:58 pm
“The Pootwattle Collaboration”… wasn’t that a Ludlum novel?
mberesf1 - January 23, 2012 at 11:54 am
While doing my master’s degree at U Chicago I took the Writing Program course for graduate students and faculty. The entire quarter was on this very same principle. It was one of the most valuable courses I have ever taken.
ellenhunt - January 23, 2012 at 3:02 pm
“The problem is that it appears simultaneously vacuous and elitist.”
Oh, dear. Oh, my dear. Oh, my sadly lost dearest Lucy. Oh, my. Oh, my.
Analysis of a sentence indicates that it means people who want to work through issues are actually in favor of pan-surveillance – and you think the only problem is that it sounds vacuous and elitist?
Oh, my poor, dear Lucy. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy. Oh, my poor lost child.
The problem, my dear, is that it is idiotic. It is disjoint. These things are orthogonal. The sentence is composed of non-sequitur.
But! You made me laugh! And I did enjoy the laugh. I shall endeavor to employ pootwattle in my posts!
Eroticization of apparatus utilizes anthropocentric history!
(Pootwattle, like all academics, is improved by judicious editing.)
Alon Lischinsky - February 2, 2012 at 5:50 am
It should be pointed out that the phenomenon Pootwattle’s creators describe, that is, the complexity and obfuscation created by the grammatical metaphor of recasting actions as nouns, has been thoroughly studied by linguists, especially in the Systemic-Functional Grammar tradition, where it goes by the name of “nominalisation”.
By itself, nominalisations are no more harmful than the passive voice; they are useful in foregrounding certain aspects of the topic, and can significantly add to the clarity of the message. To write, say, “When forces and motion are normal, and occlusion is therefore normal, the rate of eruption of teeth is equal to the rate of attrition in the hypsodont patient” (genuine example from an edited book) is far less clunky than any alternatives. In a different context, it might be necessary to mention the agents and causes of this attrition, and the nominalisation would be unadvisable, but here it plays a useful role. That’s why such devices are an essential part of academic writing.