The decline has begun

I am a grammar and punctuation Nazi and I'm not afraid to admit it. A missing or misplaced apostrophe makes me feel decidedly uncomfortable so you can imagine the horror I felt when I saw, staring back at me in large letters from the back page of The Sun on Friday, the headline 'Lamps War'.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2002390000-2007290814,00.html

The article was talking about a war belonging to Frank Lampard. Surely 'Lamp's War' is what it should have said.

I find it hard to believe that an institution like The Sun would show such a careless disregard for punctuation rules. If this is the case then it must show that the decline has begun! In a few years written English will be a confusing flow of unpunctuated nonsense.

Maybe there's another explanation for this headline. Some type of pun perhaps. If anyone can shed any light, I'd be pleased to hear it.

(I seem to complain a lot in this blog don't I? I sound like a gumpy old woman! I'll post something more positive next time...)

Hands off my news feed!

This week I spotted the first advert in Facebook's news feed, craftily disguised as an album of photos. The row of thumnails were advertising a credit company.

Add this to the fact that Facebook is now awash with 'applications', and it all seems to be going down hill for Facebook's honest and straight-forward approach.

I already long for the Facebook of a couple of months ago where, once I'd logged in, I felt I was in my own little digital world of friends and news. Now I'm sharing this world with advertisers and 'applications'. I wonder what Facebook will look like in a year. Or perhaps by then there will have been a backlash and we'll all be steering well clear of it.

(I must apologise that this blog is becoming rather Facebook orientated, but it's been giving me a lot of opinion fodder lately.)

Facebook, please don't tickle me.

It's difficult find the time to keep up with this blog, although it's always there at the back of my mind. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking - Ah! The Blog! The blog!

My latest opinion is one about Facebook. I really don't like the new 'applications' which have been added to the site. For starters, they add little value in terms of community building, are clearly a money-making technique and clog up the newsfeed with uninteresting news.

It's always been enjoyable to scan through the newsfeed to see who's now friends with who or photographic evidence of what someone got up to on Saturday night (all useful Facebook gossip). However, it is not interesting to know that someone added a Fortune Cookie application or a Tickle Me application. This is not juicy Facebook gossip, just irrelevant Facebook spam.

Hold the front page!

Kate Middleton went for a night out and her feet got dirty. This, according to the Evening Standard, is front page news.