James Weir: Elyse Knowles and influencers everywhere brought down by one typo

Think influencers are perfect? We’ve been reminded again they’re far from it.

We interrupt your Sunday with some breaking news: Influencers aren’t that smart.

Please, take a moment to regain your composure. It’s always unsettling when everything you once believed to be true turns out to be a lie.

It’s like when we found out George Calombaris couldn’t count money or when it was revealed Pete Evans wasn’t a scientist.

What’s next? Ada Nicodemou won’t be winning an Oscar for her 20-year portrayal of Leah Patterson in Home And Away?

We’ve been holding influencers to an impossibly high standard and they just can’t live up to it. Despite all the filters and Facetuning, it seems they’re only human.

Their reputations took a bashing recently when one of their top-tier leaders Elyse Knowles made a spelling mistake in an urgent dispatch from the front lines of influencing.

It wasn’t just a slip of the keys. On top of a relaxed-yet-sophisticated bedroom selfie, the Byron Bay influencer offered a simple caption: Wallah.

The internet instantly turned into Google and served up that attitude the search engine gives when you misspell a word. “Did you mean … voilà?”

Yes. She meant, “voilà”. Tray sheek, huh?

Bonjaw!

Imagine you’re in Paris and you stop off at a bistro to enjoy an aperitif as the sun sets. The waiter appears and places down a heavy-set cut crystal glass on the marble table.

“Wallaaaah!” he screeches in a surprisingly bogan accent.

The mistake made its way around the globe and instantly trashed the reputations of influencers everywhere. Typos and mispronunciations are something we’ve come to expect from reality TV contestants. But influencers? INFLUENCERS?

Just a few weeks ago some bozo on The Bachelorette introduced us to the word “eqossential” – an adjective that can be used to describe anything that’s both quintessential and essential. It may also be used to describe equine that are absolutely necessary.

And some scholars on Married At First Sight gave us “compoised” and “jepradize”. We’re all familiar with the smug inner-glow that comes from feeling both composed and poised, and now there’s a word for it.

Looking for something to Netflix this weekend? May I recommend Ashley Judd’s 1999 thriller, Double Jeprady.

It’s surprising the Oxford English Dictionary hasn’t yet added any of these words to their 2020 edition. “Blime-fibe-eb” is another term that has gained popularity in recent years after a MAFS contestant got botched lip filler and couldn’t pronounce the word “blindsided”.

This kind of nonsense is to be expected from reality TV freaks but influencers are supposed to be better. They’re meant to be perfect specimens who make us feel crap about ourselves — like modern-day Jesuses who always know where the good lighting is. Not the other way around.

I just feel like I can’t trust influencers any more. They’re supposed to be our tastemakers and news breakers. Until now, I’ve gotten my news exclusively from influencers.

Every morning, after hitting snooze on the alarm five times, I’d roll over and check Tammy Hembrow’s feed for the latest local and global updates. Then for breaking news and COVID developments I’d hit up Kylie Jenner. And obviously the best US political explainers come from memes.

But it’s all a sham. And they were brought down by one typo.

To use another famous French expression: Say-lar-vee.

Tray sheek.

THE SOCIAL ETIQUETTE OF FAKE WORK

Christmas is upon us which means, for the next two weeks before crapping off and going on holidays, we will all be diligently fake working.

So much pressure comes with fake working. Sometimes it even feels like fake working is more exhausting than actual working. There’s just so many fake plates you need to keep spinning.

In offices around the world, it goes unspoken that everyone is fake working and we use vague phrases to describe what we’re pretending to work on.

“Just laying the groundwork for a project!” I told my boss this week while hurriedly flipping through a pile of blank pages before picking up the phone for a fake business call.

On our computer monitors, we keep Word documents and spreadsheets open with fake reports and statistics displayed to help create the illusion that important business is being done but really they’re just hiding online shopping windows.

The one rule about fake working? Don’t drag other people into your fake work.

This is often done by people who feel like they’re about to get called out for fake working, so they handball a fake project to someone else. Suddenly, what was once fake work now becomes actual work for an innocent colleague who was conscientiously doing their own fake work.

Until Christmas, let’s just all agree to keep our eyes on our own fake work.

Twitter, Facebook: @hellojamesweir