My friend’s
blog post has gone viral. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone for whom this
happened. I know people who are famous and they get a zillion hits all the time
on their websites and blogs, but this is the first time I’ve known someone who
was going about her business in comfortable obscurity when suddenly the
magnifying glass of the internet appeared above her and hovered there for a
bit.
My friend,
whom I’ll call Zara, has been generous and honest with me in sharing the
details of her experience, which is why I’m giving her a fake name for this
blog post.
On a normal
day, her blog gets up to two or three hundred hits. But this post, which was
written seven months ago, got 500,000 in four days. It started one morning when
she noticed it had 2000. Within hours, that number rose quickly.
As Zara’s
new readership grew, so did the number of comments on her blog. Most were very
friendly, chatting about the content of her blog, which was funny and sexy, but
she also got a few trolls. One woman demanded Zara delete her entire blog
because of punctuation mistakes, but the woman’s rude comment got deleted
instead.
I should
back up here and say that English isn’t Zara’s first language. I think it’s her
third (out of five), and the fact that she writes in it amazes me. I struggle
with just one language, and admire anyone who would attempt to write in
anything other than her native tongue.
Sometimes
Zara and I edit each other’s fiction, and I’ve grown to rely on and value her
input when I write. When I edit her work, I love seeing the language from a
fresh perspective, and often think some of her mistakes shouldn’t be fixed, as
they add a certain charm to her work that I could never achieve.
I can’t
count the number of times I find myself trying to explain things like why we
can see far and wide, but not wide and far. We think long and hard but not hard
and long. Some things are neither here nor there, but never neither there nor
here. Sometimes Zara’s leading man will look his lover in the eye when he
should be looking into her eyes. One
of my favorites was when Zara’s hero was running to catch up with his love
interest. He ran until he was out of breath, and when he finally caught up to
her he was “smiling between his pants.”
I haven’t had a man smile between his
pants at me for a long time, and gosh, I miss it.
Zara asked me to edit her blog post—the one
that 500,000 people have now read. I guess the trolls got to her and she was
feeling insecure about her writing. I did as she asked, of course, but when I
sent the blog post back with all my edits I also counseled her not to change a
thing.
Would I correct Borat’s English? Yakov
Smirnoff’s? How about Latka’s on Taxi? Would Charo be as adorable if her
English were perfect?
Writing something correctly isn’t always
better. Who am I to argue with half a million people? They like her blog. Do
they like the content or her language misuse? Can’t it be both? And does it
really matter?
While we ponder this, Zara’s fans are
piling up, having come from wide and far, and my opinions on her language use are
neither there nor here. The fact is, she has become an internet phenomenon in a
matter of days, and that takes my breath away and makes me smile between my pants. Go, Zara, go.
