A blog post we stumbled on a while back, by a graduate student, warned other students that professors have started creating accounts on Facebook, the social-networking Web site so popular with students these days: "If a student misses class and says ‘I had a doctor’s appointment,’ I’ve seen professors that get on Facebook, read the kid’s wall and see that he was invited to a party the night before, and the kid was absent because he was actually hung over."
Are professors using Facebook for this purpose? Should professors enter this online social space for any reason? Join the discussion.
15 Responses to Should Professors Use Facebook?
Ambarish Sridharanarayanan - January 20, 2012 at 1:10 am
I thought om nom nom (and variants) originated from the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqz9ZXUoUcE
mbelvadi - January 20, 2012 at 7:49 am
There seem to be a lot of unnecessary s’s being added to these words (or sometimes z’s). Since the point of not writing the original word out was, I thought, to shorten the typing, why add the unnecessary letter? And what do you think it will mean for the next generation? I’m thinking about how the previous two generations decided that every s at the end of a word needs to have an apostrophe before it. Now we’re going to have a generation that thinks every adjective/adverb needs an s at the end of it!
Lukas Klausner - January 20, 2012 at 8:06 am
Actually, ”stabby“ is not slang for me – it’s a regular adjective meaning ”inclined to stab“ … That may come from my interest in table-top RPGs, though.
anummabrooke - January 20, 2012 at 9:02 am
I believe that “stabby” comes from the television show iCarly. The character Spencer is volunteering as an art teacher in a prison, and invites the inmates to describe their feelings. A prisoner says he feels “stabby,” and then there’s some dialogue about whether “stabby” is a feeling.
illinois1 - January 20, 2012 at 9:51 am
I am SO glad that someone else sees these expressions as childish and babytalk! They are frequently used on television celebrity gossip shows (‘popo” for paparazzi and “Riri” for Rihanna) but parents are also using silly terms like “binky” and “onesies” (they are brand names but seem to be used more generically). The real problem with shortened versions of words (perpetuated by advertising) is that the original spelling is either forgotten or never learned. Should we encourage a standardized form of communication or should we be open to anything? Or are people capable of learning to use different forms of communication in different contexts?
Mary Davenport Davis - January 20, 2012 at 9:52 am
I’m a few years older than these women. Some of these terms I have never heard, some I have heard and find irritating, and some I use on a regular basis. Getting toward the end of the article, I could feel myself getting prickly waiting for Yagoda to take either the horrified or condescending route, but am relieved to find that yes, I can agree with him. This is weird.
In regard to the overuse of S’s: I have often heard (and, alas, said) “for realses” or “for realsies.” The pluralization often seems to connote a mock gravity.
ognib - January 20, 2012 at 10:25 am
White folks!
Jelly is short for “jelly roll” in black vernacular, going way back, at least as far as Jelly Roll Morton, and is slang for the female organs. Insert this in Beyonce’s song to see if it makes sense.
hanson2 - January 20, 2012 at 12:16 pm
The addition of letters at the end, mainly the z, is a product of the smart-phone. The addition signifies that you are so emotional, whatever that emotion may be, that you accidentally add letters. Sometimes, this also includes a wrong spelling. Ex: Lulz (Read as: this was so funny I laughed out loud and forgot how to spell and added a Z at the end. OMG).
job_seeker1 - January 20, 2012 at 1:09 pm
“Amazeballs” is big in the gay community, perhaps due to Perez Hilton. I rarely heard it used outside this context.
Guest - January 20, 2012 at 3:38 pm
It should obviate the need/use of the apostrophe altogether.
And as an added bonus, it could put an end to the often-taught “rule” about putting the apostrophe before or after “the ‘s’” — without distinguishing between the plural s and the possessive s or providing a hint to the uninitiated about how to sort them out.
Language always will out over mavenry.
mr_pond - January 23, 2012 at 10:01 am
That’s a good observation. I remember when I was a wee boy having my stuffed animals devour each other with roars of ‘om nom nom!’ well before the coming of lolcatz.
I suspect, especially given the icanhazcheezburger meme of cute spelling, ‘nom’ is a rendering of ‘num’, as in ‘Yummy yummy this is nummy!’ The OED lists ‘num’ as a variant of ‘yum’, and dates it back to 1899: http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/265179
To be even more pedantic (if such were possible), the ‘num’ entry appeared in the 1989 edition and revised in 2003, whereas the famous cheezburger image didn’t appear until in 2007, with the earliest lolcatz appearing only in 2005 (according to Wikipedia, but they know about these sort of things: http://goo.gl/N7NA).
So this seems to have to do with variant spelling rather than coinage. Babytalk, obviously, but apparently not an internet-era addition to the lexicon at all, really. I notice that Arik Hanson didn’t demand to know what cheezburger meant.
(Contrast this with groovy, http://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/81741, which only took on its current definition c1937-1944. In the nineteenth century, it seems to have been either strictly descriptive or derogatory. And now you know.)
Anyone know the etymology of ‘cowabunga’?
brozema - January 23, 2012 at 1:43 pm
Ed Sullivan would have said, “the youngsters.”
darthvader09 - January 25, 2012 at 11:53 am
I know it from the TMNT, but my husband says it’s from Howdy Doody.
Sally Peters - January 26, 2012 at 9:59 am
Jelly is a slang term that has been around for a couple of hundred years. It has its roots in the slave culture, when African Americans needed to talk in code. Talking about any sweet would be code for wanting sex. Seems like the white folks are finally catching on. Maybe. ;)
andib - February 1, 2012 at 2:31 pm
“Nom nom” most likely comes from the first video to show a cat meowing while it eats–the sound they make when doing so sounds like “nom nom nom nom.” More or less a LOLcat origin, though not technically from the language of lolspeak (“can haz” and the like).
It was probably one of these videos that originated the term:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl5Pfc5TyO0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnagRjxp7v4