I COULD take this bait, or I could satisfy myself that 325 people had absolutely no problem understanding how a megaphone doesn’t need to be a LITERAL megaphone, and go about my day. I know which I’m gonna do, and wish you luck in whatever you’ve got on your plate, my needlessly confrontational friend.
I mean most likely if someone didn’t get it they probably just moved on and didn’t comment or even vote. So wouldn’t look into the votes too much as a source on how easy to understand the meme was
You know what? That’s a fair point, so I’m going to go ahead and use this as a teachable moment.
Let’s break this sentence down bit by bit.
Let’s take the word “megaphone”. Megaphone is a noun defined as a device that amplifies sound, particularly voices. It may come as a shock, but in the English language, a thing doesn’t have to LITERALLY be the the thing we call it, but we can assign a label to something because it shares certain relevant characteristics. (i.e. someone doesn’t have to LITERALLY be a troll to be called one, just horribly unpleasant and nasty).
Now as for the next step, we’re going to apply the word Nazi. Now, don’t get confused here! I know you’re sitting there saying “Nazi is a noun!” but here’s another neat aspect of English! Nouns can BECOME adjectives! (i.e. troll poster). So if we put both of those together, we get a meaning something like “An object that amplifies the voices of Nazis”.
Next let’s take a look at the right side. “run by an evil billionaire prick” is what we call a “relative clause”, more specifically a “reduced relative clause”, because I’ve omitted the “that is” that might have come at the head of it. See, In English, when we have a noun, we can use relative clauses or prepositional phrases to add more information to really specify the details of what we’re talking about.
So if we put it all together, we have “an object that amplifies the voices of Nazis that is run by an evil billionaire prick”. Now, at this point, I could give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have no idea what I’m talking about. It would be an INCREDIBLE miss on your part seeing as how this is an Elon Musk community, but I’ll be charitable and spell it out and say this refers to “Twitter”, or “X” as the Musk fans like to refer to it. Let’s go ahead and replace that, and this is now our noun.
Twitter, in case you are unaware, is a social media platform delivered via the internet. In English, it is perfectly acceptable usage to use the word “leave” to refer to cessation of usage of an internet platform (i.e. leaving Facebook).
Now, stick with me here, because we’re going to put these elements together.
The best time to [stop using] [Twitter] is two years ago.
This does bring forward the first legitimate grammatical complaint here, which is that my choice of the present tense form of “be” with the '“two years ago” is a bit jarring if you read this as a single past tense event, but I decided the ongoing timeless nature of the original proverb was a better fit.
Not really all that complicated, but I get it. English is hard and not everyone is good at it.
You’re being weirdly hostile and demeaning about someone who isn’t a native speaker (talking about me) not immediately getting the meaning of your meme. Sorry it took me a few attempts, I guess.
(Duplicating here to ensure you see it) I apologize. You’re right. That response was out of proportion and I let some nitpicking drive me to an inappropriate level of escalation. You in particular didn’t deserve to have the full brunt of that put into a direct response to you - you were the most reasonable commenter here. I was out of line.
Not at all. I know it’s not a good reason, or a valid excuse, but I had a really bad couple of days and after my head cooled I felt awful about taking it out on you, especially after finding you really AREN’T a native speaker. 100% my post was completely out of line. Hope it wasn’t too disruptive to your day.
I COULD take this bait, or I could satisfy myself that 325 people had absolutely no problem understanding how a megaphone doesn’t need to be a LITERAL megaphone, and go about my day. I know which I’m gonna do, and wish you luck in whatever you’ve got on your plate, my needlessly confrontational friend.
Even the person you replied to said “Took me a few reads”. And another post was confused as well.
It runs fine on my machine
I mean most likely if someone didn’t get it they probably just moved on and didn’t comment or even vote. So wouldn’t look into the votes too much as a source on how easy to understand the meme was
You know what? That’s a fair point, so I’m going to go ahead and use this as a teachable moment.
Let’s break this sentence down bit by bit.
Let’s take the word “megaphone”. Megaphone is a noun defined as a device that amplifies sound, particularly voices. It may come as a shock, but in the English language, a thing doesn’t have to LITERALLY be the the thing we call it, but we can assign a label to something because it shares certain relevant characteristics. (i.e. someone doesn’t have to LITERALLY be a troll to be called one, just horribly unpleasant and nasty).
Now as for the next step, we’re going to apply the word Nazi. Now, don’t get confused here! I know you’re sitting there saying “Nazi is a noun!” but here’s another neat aspect of English! Nouns can BECOME adjectives! (i.e. troll poster). So if we put both of those together, we get a meaning something like “An object that amplifies the voices of Nazis”.
Next let’s take a look at the right side. “run by an evil billionaire prick” is what we call a “relative clause”, more specifically a “reduced relative clause”, because I’ve omitted the “that is” that might have come at the head of it. See, In English, when we have a noun, we can use relative clauses or prepositional phrases to add more information to really specify the details of what we’re talking about.
So if we put it all together, we have “an object that amplifies the voices of Nazis that is run by an evil billionaire prick”. Now, at this point, I could give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have no idea what I’m talking about. It would be an INCREDIBLE miss on your part seeing as how this is an Elon Musk community, but I’ll be charitable and spell it out and say this refers to “Twitter”, or “X” as the Musk fans like to refer to it. Let’s go ahead and replace that, and this is now our noun.
Twitter, in case you are unaware, is a social media platform delivered via the internet. In English, it is perfectly acceptable usage to use the word “leave” to refer to cessation of usage of an internet platform (i.e. leaving Facebook).
Now, stick with me here, because we’re going to put these elements together.
The best time to [stop using] [Twitter] is two years ago.
This does bring forward the first legitimate grammatical complaint here, which is that my choice of the present tense form of “be” with the '“two years ago” is a bit jarring if you read this as a single past tense event, but I decided the ongoing timeless nature of the original proverb was a better fit.
Not really all that complicated, but I get it. English is hard and not everyone is good at it.
You’re being weirdly hostile and demeaning about someone who isn’t a native speaker (talking about me) not immediately getting the meaning of your meme. Sorry it took me a few attempts, I guess.
(Duplicating here to ensure you see it) I apologize. You’re right. That response was out of proportion and I let some nitpicking drive me to an inappropriate level of escalation. You in particular didn’t deserve to have the full brunt of that put into a direct response to you - you were the most reasonable commenter here. I was out of line.
I appreciate you saying this
Not at all. I know it’s not a good reason, or a valid excuse, but I had a really bad couple of days and after my head cooled I felt awful about taking it out on you, especially after finding you really AREN’T a native speaker. 100% my post was completely out of line. Hope it wasn’t too disruptive to your day.
I’m not unfamilair to losing my cool sometimes. So I get it. Happens. I was more surprised about the reaction than anything.
I just want to let you know, you wasted a lot of time typing this all up, so I’m not wasting any more by reading it 🤗