The people of the Internets appear to be confused about the meaning of the word obligatory. According to dictionary.com, the definitive source for etymology, “obligatory” comes from a latin word meaning “to bind”. Modern synonyms include “mandatory” and “compulsory.” So you can imagine how confusing it is to see a stream of social media posts with “obligatory selfies” and “obligatory shout outs to the diner in Nowheresville, USA, where I just had the BEST scrambled eggs - seriously, you’ve never even TASTED eggs until you’ve stopped by Aunt Matilda’s Lard Wagon on your way through Nowheresville.”
Knowing what we know about the english language, one cannot help but picture sweet Aunt Matilda sidling up behind you and pressing a cold, steel, 9 mm pistol into your back and whispering in your ear, “you WILL get out your phone and post something on social media about my eggs or I will END you.” How else could we explain all of these compulsory messages flooding our inboxes?
An alternative, if less titillating, explanation is that our friends’ self-absorption has now seeped so far into their brains that they have confused their own need for constant external affirmation with a genuine desire to live up to the commitments that a civil society binds us to keep. So in the spirit of putting the world back in order, let’s set some bright-line rules for the road:
- Unless you’re on a vacation to North Korea, there are no obligatory selfies.
- The only shout-outs that are obligatory are the ones Kim Kardashian makes to fulfill contractual obligations with her well-paying sponsors.
- You are never obliged to comment on anything. Period. [But, of course, please comment below if you have something interesting to add to the discussion.]
- If and only if there is some sort of bizarre, Mommy Dearest quid pro quo in your family for Christmas money are you obliged to post pictures of your kids looking like hot messes next to the perfectly good chocolate cake that they ruined.
On the off chance that you are actually being held against your will by a captor whose idea of a sick joke [touche evil captor] is to have you narrate every mundane detail of your life as though a gaggle of TMZ paparazzi were waiting to see what you would order at Starbucks, then please give us some sort of signal. Maybe instead of “obligatory selfie” you could type “there’s a madman who is hell-bent on making me look vain and insecure” and we would all get the message and send help.
We could also just flip the equation and keep using “obligatory” but only for things that actually are. We would be hard pressed to justify rolling our eyes at your “obligatory tax return” or “obligatory mug shot.” But even this has the potential devolve. We assume our friends would have more sense than to post about their “obligatory colonoscopy” or “obligatory court-ordered community service”, but stranger things have happened. So probably best just to finish where we started and begin the obligatory “unfriending” of anyone who cannot be bothered to open a dictionary before opening their mouths.
