What happened to the fine art of Euphemism?

A: Would you like to attend <some event that is guaranteed to be so boring, you would want to cut your wrists just to pit yourself out of misery>?

B: I think I am washing my hair.

A: Wahhh... you wash hair take so long time one, meh?

Okay... somebody here seriously needs some lessons in euphemisms and sarcasm. The above example may not really have happened. But believe me, I have heard of / read about very similar episodes in real life.

These are what I call “potong steam” (Malay: Lit. “cut off the steam”, or kill-joy) responses to really cheeky one-liners that were meant to be funny – not taken literally or seriously. And I’ve read quite a few such singularly obtuse responses on Facebook recently. It just takes all the fun out of dry wit. I really feel like wringing the buggers’ throats and saying, “Which part of the joke don’t you get?” Come to think of it, if you have to even ask the question, then the exercise of explaining it is futile in itself. Perhaps it’s a language thing, no two ways about it.

Neil Humphreys even devoted one chapter of his book “Notes from an Even Smaller Island” to this. I couldn’t agree more. These sad sods need to stop taking things so literally, and get a life.

Facebook Etiquette 101: Do you plankheads know what the “photo tag” function is really for??

I never really understood why some people habitually tag their Facebook friends’ ID's to clothes, flowers, furniture, restaurant menus, dogs and cats... just about anything other than the persons themselves. It’s no wonder then, when you browse their photos in their Facebook profile, 90% of the tagged pictures show nothing but inanimate objects (the remaining 10% being dogs and cats), making you wonder if the poor buggers are even human.

When I browse a friend’s tagged photo, I expect to see just that - my friend’s face. Not Fifi her neighbour’s chihuahua, a pair of Prada stilettos that does not even belong to her, or a club sandwich on the TGIF menu.

So much for the Facebook developers taking all that trouble to build-in the automatic facial recognition feature (yes, people - in case you have not figured it out even after reading this far, you are supposed to tag your friends’ faces) in the photo tagging function. They may as well have saved themselves the trouble, and designed it to recognise a horse’s arse.

Yes, I know what these blockheads are going to say, “Oh, I tagged those pair of shoes to their ID, because I wanted to mention about it to them.” To which I respond thus, “If you are a regular-enough Facebook user to know how to tag someone in a photo, surely you are also familiar with the [@person’s ID] function in the comments text-box (if not, please go and learn).” That will just as certainly ensure that they get notified of your “mentioning them” in their e-mail Inbox, and it takes just as little effort to execute. For Pete’s sake, please learn to use your tools properly, as they were intended for.