Dave Wilton - 05 October 2011 03:02 AM

Why the hell FB doesn’t give us the option just to turn the damn things off is beyond me.

This is the root of the problem.  It’s not so much that Facebook is constantly changing; it’s that you have no choice in the matter.  When one of the Zuckerminions decides it’s time to roll out a Hot New Feature, you can’t opt in; you’ve already got it, whether you like it or not.  Often you can’t opt out, either, or if you can, you have to navigate through ten layers of menus to find the appropriate box to check or uncheck.  Then, a couple of weeks later, another update gets released, and you discover that all of your settings have reverted to their previous values or disappeared entirely.  Now that Google+ is ramping up, this kind of thing may well spur a mass exodus from FB.

A couple of facebook users have had fun with the difference in meaning between the Zuck-verbs and the common verbs, by calling their pages “Like this if you like this”.

When I hear like being spoken in the Zuckersense I almost always seem to hear quotation marks around the word.

Someone forwarded me a dealie saying, “See what color people inbox you!”

I’m not ready for the Zuckerberg language revolution yet.

OP Tipping - 06 May 2013 08:26 AM

Someone forwarded me a dealie ...

Dealie?

OP Tipping -

“… See what color people inbox you!”

I’m having trouble parsing this.

Not that I have a problem with inbox as a verb, mind.  I would be surprised if it didn’t predate Facebook by a good bit.

Zythophile - 07 May 2013 04:16 AM

OP Tipping - 06 May 2013 08:26 AM

Someone forwarded me a dealie ...

Dealie?

My mistake. The standard spelling is deelie.

I’m having trouble parsing this.

As am I.

I recall “dealie” (I’m not sure I ever saw it written, but I would have spelled it that way) as a slang term from my youth meaning, roughly, “whatchamacallit” or “thing”.  I suppose it to be an elaboration of “deal” as in “a big deal”, “what’s the deal?”, etc.

My best guess is that “See what color people inbox you” means “Check out the Facebook pages of people you know, and find out what color they have assigned to the messages of yours that are in their inboxes.” Another, but less likely, alternative that occurs to me is, “Look at your inbox on Facebook, and find out what colors people who sent you messages assigned to the messages that they sent you.” I don’t know enough about Facebook to know whether a message’s color assignment is done by the sender or the receiver, but I would guess the latter.

[Edited to delete baseless speculation.  The above paragraph is baseless speculation, too, but is preserved so that the later comments about it don’t become needlessly cryptic.]

Is the specific use of “inbox” here, as the kids say, “a thing” (or a thingie), or is this a nonce usage?  Does “inbox”, when verbed, have a settled meaning?

My best guess is that “See what color people inbox you” means “Check out the Facebook pages of people you know, and find out what color they have assigned to the messages of yours that are in their inboxes.” Another, but less likely, alternative that occurs to me is, “Look at your inbox on Facebook, and find out what colors people who sent you messages assigned to the messages that they sent you.” I don’t know enough about Facebook to know whether a message’s color assignment is done by the sender or the receiver, but I would guess the latter.

I’m not aware of any such colour options in FB.

I’m not, either, it was just the only way I could think of plausibly linking people, color, and inbox.

In what context did the person in the dealie make this cryptic remark?

Per a little googling, “inbox me” is a fairly common (Facebook) expression meaning, “send a message to my inbox” (i.e., so only I, not everybody who can see my status updates, gets it).

I would (now) guess that the comment in the dealie means, “see what colors various people pick/mention/reference in the messages that they send to your inbox.” That doesn’t explain the sense in which the messages you are sent would pick/reference/mention a color, nor why the senders would send them to your inbox rather than use status updates, but neither of those ambiguities are direct results of the verbing of “inbox.” (Although my unfamiliarity with the verbing assisted me in misinterpreting the statement.)

"I inboxed my love a colour” is the new “I gave my love a cherry”.