Grammar has become a serious matter with social networking site Facebook. You should no longer see such statements as “Suzie changed their profile picture.”

If you are a Facebook user who hasn’t specified your gender in your Facebook profile you will be asked to in the coming weeks. That way Facebook doesn’t have to default to “their” or the made up word “themself” as it did in the past.

Not knowing someone’s gender does pose problems with English grammar but even more so as Facebook expands to other languages it creates more problems. This is due to the fact that in other languages there isn’t a gender neutral option available in plural form. People who haven’t indicated their sex have been defaulted to the wrong sex entirely. According to management at Facebook transgendered people and other users who find the male-female distinction limiting will still have the option of removing gender entirely from their profiles.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has dealt with grammar related issues. At first members were limited to what they could say in their “status updates” for their friends, as in “Tom is wasting time on Facebook.” Facebook late last year decided to drop the “is” and allow users to supply their own verb and write updates such as “Tom just wasted time on Facebook.”

These improvements definitely make Facebook more pleasant to work with.

Technorati Tags: grammar, facebook, social networking, status updates