You’ll need a bunch in a single passage. If you don’t need to disambiguate a large hairball of differently-timed people (like in My Best and Worst Mistake), then you probably shouldn’t bother in general.
Would you say that about citations? “Oh, you only use one source in this paragraph, so just omit the author/year/title. The reader can probably figure it out from mentions elsewhere if they really need to anyway.” That the use of subscripts is particularly clear when you have a hairball of references (in an example constructed to show benefits) doesn’t mean solitary uses are useless.
I’m struggling to see how this is an improvement over “on FB” or “on Facebook” for either the reader or the writer, assuming you don’t want to bury-but-still-mention the medium/audience.
It’s a matter of emphasis. Yes, you can write it out longhand, much as you can write out any equation or number long hand as not 22230 but “twenty-two divided by two-hundred-and-thirty” if necessary. Natural language is Turing-complete, so to speak: anything you do in a typographic way or a DSL like equations can be done as English (and of course, prior to the invention of various notations, people did write out equations like that, as painful as it is trying to imagine doing algebra while writing everything out without the benefit of even equal-signs). But you usually shouldn’t.
Is the mention of being Facebook in that example so important it must be called out like that? I didn’t think so. It seemed like the kind of snark a husband might make in passing. Writing it out feels like ‘explaining the joke’. Snark doesn’t work if you need to surround it in flashing neon lights with arrows pointing inward saying “I am being sarcastic and cynical and ironic here”. You can modify the example in your head to something which puts less emphasis on Facebook, if you feel strongly about it.
Would you say that about citations? “Oh, you only use one source in this paragraph, so just omit the author/year/title. The reader can probably figure it out from mentions elsewhere if they really need to anyway.” That the use of subscripts is particularly clear when you have a hairball of references (in an example constructed to show benefits) doesn’t mean solitary uses are useless.
It’s a matter of emphasis. Yes, you can write it out longhand, much as you can write out any equation or number long hand as not 22230 but “twenty-two divided by two-hundred-and-thirty” if necessary. Natural language is Turing-complete, so to speak: anything you do in a typographic way or a DSL like equations can be done as English (and of course, prior to the invention of various notations, people did write out equations like that, as painful as it is trying to imagine doing algebra while writing everything out without the benefit of even equal-signs). But you usually shouldn’t.
Is the mention of being Facebook in that example so important it must be called out like that? I didn’t think so. It seemed like the kind of snark a husband might make in passing. Writing it out feels like ‘explaining the joke’. Snark doesn’t work if you need to surround it in flashing neon lights with arrows pointing inward saying “I am being sarcastic and cynical and ironic here”. You can modify the example in your head to something which puts less emphasis on Facebook, if you feel strongly about it.