Hook-up how-to! Japanese acting student?
Anyone can split an occasional infinitive or confuse an adjective with an adverb. To more than merely say, one should not feel too badly. It happens. In the course of daily life, these are but minor infractions.
An inter-office e-mail containing a confusion of the case or tense amounts to naught. Yet, as with most things, it all depends on context. In the wrong place, at the wrong time, a little bad grammar, punctuation or usage can go astray.
Take, for example, the dating sites proliferating online. There is something for everyone out there: men, women, men transitioning into women, women transitioning into men, and just about anything Dr. Kinsey could imagine. Here, a little laxity with language can lead to the most untoward effects. Consider the following:
Japanese acting student, seeks just one special person (25-35). I am shy, romantic, and like dancing, film, travel. Love treesomes! Private photos on request.
I had trepidations about replying on this social media platform. Platform diving always seemed too dangerous. The higher the diving board became, the more timorous and likely I was to retreat or to perform the cannonball. “I’m not risking my neck for a perfect dive,” I thought. “Five seconds of exhilaration for 50 years in a wheelchair? No way.”
Anyway, I couldn’t determine if the “Japanese Acting Student “was an Asian studying at Yale Drama or an African learning Kabuki. Too confusing. I did not “like” the student.
As to the desired treesome, I decided it was just a typo. “There is nothing as beautiful as a tree.” I love Arbor Day too, but not on this platform.
After scanning the ads — for purely professional reasons mind you — it seems the missing comma is indeed the most common source of confusion. “Fun loving” is, after all, something altogether unlike “fun, loving.” In the former case, a date might include a trip to an amusement park, while the latter might involve a candlelit dinner highlighted by witty quips. Likewise, is a “professional (,) romantic” a maudlin MD or just a gigolo?
Beyond the grammatically deficient there is another type of dubious post– the self-aggrandizing one. One might indeed be a 110 pound female or a 170 pound male—but only on the lunar surface. And age is often expressed in dog years (multiply by 7). You wouldn’t want to meet a self-aggrandizer. It would be just another opportunity to have your unrealistic expectations dashed.
Invariably, there are posts placed by isolated inmates professing innocence. Apparently, many are drawn to liaisons with the convicted. It seems if you really want to enhance your dating and marriage prospects all you have to do is get convicted of a string of gruesome killings. In the solitary years between sentencing and lethal-injection you’ll have to fight off the suitors–you’ll be highly eligible, although not for parole. My advice is just to forget romance with the incarcerated. It’s the least you can do to keep your possessions intact and recidivism in check. I recently heard that Charles Manson is betrothed. It will not be a destination wedding.
The Internet has engendered a new world of romantic possibilities–kind of intriguing, don’t you think?
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