Which is correct?
Twitter tip: Don’t call yourself by name in your profile bio, use “I” or “me” instead. Speaking about _________ in the third person sounds pretentious and psychologically unstable.
a. one’s self
b. oneself

Answer: b.

Explanation:

One’s self is considered archaic, although it is still sometimes used when the emphasis is on the self as an entity. You might, for example, speak of psychology as a means of gaining a better understanding of one’s self. However, even in that case, you wouldn’t be wrong to use oneself instead.

People expect that you are the author of your own Twitter account and also the author of the bio, so introduce yourself the same way you’d do it in person.

Referring to yourself in third person — as if you were not yourself, and not another person speaking to you, but someone talking about some third party — is called illeism. Ille is Latin for he, the third-person pronoun for males.

Wikipedia has an interesting article about illeism. Here’s a snippet:

… illeism can be used to reinforce self-promotion, as used to sometimes comic effect by Bob Dole throughout his political career.^[2] This was particularly made notable during the United States presidential election, 1996 and lampooned broadly in popular media for years afterwards.

Similarly illeism is used with an air of grandeur, to give the speaker lofty airs. Idiosyncratic and conceited people are known to either use or are lampooned as using illeism to puff themselves up or illustrate their egoism. The artist Salvador Dalí used illeism throughout his interview with 60 Minutes‘s Mike Wallace, punctuating it with “Dalí is immortal and will not die,” although this may have been a reference to the legacy of his art rather than his actual self. The wrestler The Rock was notorious for this, mainly to enhance his persona to a superhuman level.

 ***

See also: What’s wrong with this Twitter profile? (It’s a different and even more horrible problem.)

Follow me on Twitter @tao_of_grammar

I’m carrying on from yesterday’s post on decisioning, which generated some heated responses. The flamebait: “Is “decisioning” an acceptable word?” Among the responses:

@kemulholland: No, “decisioning” is not acceptable in any context except a Dilbert strip. Kill it with FIRE.

@KellyDrill: No no no no no.

@EastBeachEdit: Only if “choicing” is too.

@H_E_Sarah: Not just no, but *ALL-CAPS EXPLETIVE deleted* NO!

@kemulholland: Thanks for starting my day with the post on “decisioning” – I’m awake! My claws are sharp! Let the editing begin!

This morning, I heard from the other side, in a tweet from @intelligentform informing me that “decisioning”  is “actually a technical term in IT, particularly in regards to Decision Management and Business Rules.”

No further explanation was provided and I didn’t really find such a vague allusion satisfactory as an argument. We define technical terms on WhatIs.com. We try to avoid jargon as much as possible and at least mark it as such when we have to refer to it. So I did a little search for a definition of “decisioning” and here’s what I found, among the expected marketing gobbledygook:

From ZootWeb.com: 

Decisioning
The process of obtaining an automated decision based on pre-determined pass/fail criteria.

Although I’m sure there must be a better word, that definition at least differentiates decisioning from human decision-making  – decisioning is an automated decision-making process. I don’t like it, but I can understand why we might want to have a different word for when software makes a decision as opposed to when a human does.

The Free Dictionary allows it as a transitive verb:

tr.v. de·ci·sioned, de·ci·sion·ing, de·ci·sions  Sports

Ohhhhhhh… it comes from sports. I should have known.

I thought I’d run a Google search just to see how many hits “decisioning” gets: 410,000

First time I searched, though, I inadvertently entered Google’s predictive text-generated search term, “decisioning solutions.”

Apparently someone thought it was a cool term to use as their company name. Uh, no.

There were also generic references, as in this article:
Realtime decisioning solutions will be a differentiator for customer service

Anyway, if you’ve finished retching, I’ll give you the numbers for “decisioning solutions”: 41,300.

And you thought “decisioning” was as bad as it got.

Follow me on Twitter @tao_of_grammar

2. Vendors — including Apple, Google and Microsoft — usually have their own versions of auto-correct programs and, as a result, their own particular auto-correct fails.

Answer: 1.

Explanation:
In today’s post, I’m learning right along with some of you. As you may or may not know, I’m not really a grammarian—I just play one on the Internet. I realized only recently, though, that I’d also been playing fast and loose with my punctuation. Yes, I remember as if it were only last week… it was Punctuation Day and a number of people had tweeted about en dashes and em dashes. I thought to myself, well, as a fake grammarian, I really should at least know that I’m using these correctly. Turns out I wasn’t. Although Word helpfully converts two hyphens typed together (which is what I was using) into an em dash, em dashes are correctly used without spaces and I had been using them—quite freely, I might add—with spaces either side. I know better now!

CuteWriting explains the uses of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes.

Follow me on Twitter @tao_of_grammar

When I wrote that quiz, I’m sure I was just pleased to come up with a snappy title and never stopped to consider that it might be considered disrespectful. I don’t associate the word “savage” with indigenous peoples and never have. However, it’s been a derogatory term applied to them for centuries and so it was not a good choice to use in reference to ill-mannered behavior.

I know that the many indigenous cultures around the world are varied and rich and I hope and pray that those cultures and their wisdom may be preserved. I also know that the behavior of supposedly civilized peoples of European origin is responsible for a lot of damage to indigenous peoples and cultures. Their behavior was often savage and the damage continues to this day. The last thing I would ever want to do is to add insult to that injury.

I would never have used that word if I’d thought about it carefully. Although when we hear the word etiquette, we might think of Emily Post and white gloves, the concept is important and always relevant. It’s as true online as it is offline: Good manners are about consideration for the people we share this planet with. And words matter.

See more about Donna Morton and her mission here.

Follow me on Twitter@tao_of_grammar.

Answer: a

I was surprised to see low and behold in otherwise competent writing today and had a little look around. There seem to be a fair number of people who are confused about this phrase.

Lo is a middle English word meaning look. People were loing all through the Bible. Lo and behold means look and see. A little redundant, but that’s not our issue here.

Low, as a verb, is a synonym for moo. Ever heard cows vocalizing as they watch you pass by? They’re lowing and beholding.

Lo and behold was The Mavens’ Word of the Day.

Follow us on Twitter @tao_of_grammar