If you’re on social media, or if you enjoy shopping in touristy t-shirt shops in beachside towns, you’ve probably seen some variation on this t-shirt. After being indoctinated by my 11th grade English teacher (hi, Mrs. Edington!) regarding appropriate comma use, I’m more than a little bit judgmental about anyone who gets this wrong.
Just in case, however, these sentences look the same to you, I’ll explain:
LET’S EAT, GRANDMA. This one is an invitation from the speaker to his or her grandma to join him or her in eating. We don’t know what they’re eating, but we know to whom the speaker is addressing the invitation. That doesn’t seem important, but it is. The comma tells us that.
LET’S EAT GRANDMA. In this sentence, we have no idea who is being invited to join the speaker in this act of cannibalism, but we do know that the meal — or, if she’s petite, the snack — is Grandma. Without the comma, grandma is the subject of the eating.
That comma saves Grandma’s life. Get it? Funny, right?! This example in particular allows us all to laugh at the grammar mistake that forgets the comma, mostly because we are all generally certain that the speaker means to invite Grandma to eat and not to be eaten. Other vocabulary and grammar mistakes can be harder to decipher, though, and some of them really do get in the way of clear communication with the people around you. This is sometimes issue with me and my clients in the category of technology and computer vocabulary. Today, I’d like to address the difference between download and upload — there is a distinct difference, and saying one when you mean another can result in a lot of troubleshooting time for the tech support person with whom you’re working.
Let’s start with my favorite tactic — an analogy. Because we’re talking about two words that begin with diametrically opposed beginnings — down and up — I try to imagine the destination generally always being above the original location of the data. I also try to pair the words with a direction; I always download from somewhere and upload to somewhere else.
To put this grammar and vocabulary into use, let’s imagine you’ve taken a whole bunch of great photos at an event for your organization and they’re all on your camera. You need to get them off of your camera and onto your computer so that, in the end, you can put them on your web site. Here’s the path of your photos:
How does this translate into a conversation with your tech support or your web consultant? It makes all the difference in the world. When a client calls me and says “I’ve been trying to download this PDF on my web site and I keep getting an error message,” I assume they are trying to click on a link on their live, public web site and pull that PDF file down onto their computer. The ensuing conversation (“On which page is the PDF link?” etc.) will go in the wrong direction entirely if what my client really meant was “I’m trying to upload this PDF file to my web site so that other people can download it.”
Repeat after me: I am downloading a great song from the iTunes store.
And now: I am uploading a photo to my web site’s content management system.
Congratulations! Your photos and files are going in the right direction and, most importantly, Grandma is safe.