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The problem is not that they took it. There are always bad actors.

The problem is that very few people cared.

So even if people start leaving facebook in mass, it will just start all over again with another bad actor.




It was probably autocorrect, but just FYI: en masse - it's from French, meaning something like, "in a large group".

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/en_masse


The irony is, I'm french, and I tried to "englishify" "en masse", thinking it made sense.


English is already partly French, thanks to the Normans. You can usually drop individual French words straight in without a problem, and sometimes short idiomatic phrases. Trying to translate will just shed any idiomatic character. En masse is already idiomatically associated with groups of people, whereas "in mass" makes us think in terms of kilograms.

How many tons of people are leaving Facebook now?

As another example, if you translated tete a tete into "head to head", those actually have slightly different meanings in English. Tete a tete translates idiomatically to "one on one", a private meeting of the minds, while "head to head" is a direct--usually public--confrontation or encounter, as one might find in a sporting match.


Voila, I learned the fact du jour. This makes my day, or my joie de vivre if I may say.

Do I do it right ?


Yes. Those are all meaningful to native Anglophones. Those who learned English as a secondary language might have some trouble, though.

You could think of English as a contest between other languages, to see which one can get the biggest share of the etymology. French is one of the leaders. A lot of the core words come from Norman, but modern terms, particularly those drawn from cuisine and fashion, have made it in as well.


These little facts give life a certain je ne sais quoi


I speak Spanish (native) and Italian (fluent) on top of English (best language).

I found French class hard growing up. Until I realized that this "latin" language had as much in common with English as it did my two romanance language.


Or you can say, they did not care because bad actors paid them?


Again, leaders are not the main issue. The problem is more that very little users cared.


> So even if people start leaving facebook in mass, it will just start all over again with another bad actor.

unless they want to prevent this from happening in the long run?


Who are "they" in your sentence ? If "they" are Facebook, then it's not the point. If "they" are the user, then I doubt that the current outrage is anything more than the scandal "du jour". I spent 10 years talking about this with people around me. Very little cared enough to even start thinking about it for a minute. Not to mention taking life decision with it in mind.




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