jhameia:

angryfishtrap:

feynites:

runawaymarbles:

averagefairy:

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

has this reached the level of code-switching yet? ‘cause it sure feels like it.

I mean, I work with ppl in their 40s/50s/60s who are damn sharp when it comes to tech, being engineers, but they mostly talk amongst themselves, from what I can tell. So they show little to no influence from 20s/30s style texting, let alone the under-20 crowd (and yes, I see subtle differences in each). Or maybe it’s that being mostly over-40, they see their style as dominating any work-related conversations? and don’t see why they need to code-switch.

But geez I feel like I’m doing this switching thing all the time, based on who I’m texting/DMing. 40-plus? All-caps and they’ll recoil like you’re screaming. Under-20? they’ll do entire lines in all-caps and it just means a kind of frantic excitement. Roughly, yolo and orz seem to be 20s/30s. I see lmao and rofl mostly from 40+. Under about 30, I see ‘ahaha’ instead of lol, while 20s/30s will do ‘lolol’. Ones like afaict or bbiaf are 40+, which isn’t to say 20s/30s don’t know them, they just don’t use them. And ime or imo (and definitely imho) are 40+. 

And don’t even get me started on punctuation. The crazy thing is, at work I’ll do the ‘…’ part and cut way back on the exclamation points. And you might be able to tell the first few posts/responses I do in the hour after work, like I have to get that 40+ style out of my system. 

midnight rolls around, I’ve dropped most punctuation except to indicate tone, whacked capitalization, and litter everything with acronyms etc etc and then in the middle of it there’s a lmao and I’m like how tf did that get in there that’s work crap wtf orz  

re: all caps–I’ll read it as excitement if the words express some sort of excitement. I use CAPSLOCK for happy flailing all the time. 

BUT! While editing my dissertation, my adviser (who honestly is probably not that much older but is definitely of a different tech generation) put her critique and comments IN ALL CAPS… but in green, so it wouldn’t be alarming (unlike red). And because it’s things like “WHY IS THIS HERE? WHAT IS THE MAIN ARGUMENT/THESIS? YOU NEED A STRONGER SENTENCE” I literally quailed. It took me two weeks to get back to my diss, after my adviser wrote to me with concern that I hadn’t said anything. Turns out she wrote it in ALL CAPS because she wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it. (Because, yanno, the whole differently-coloured text might not work.)

I also noticedthis  back in the late 90′s when I was first chatting that older folks I’d encounter in chatrooms wrote IN ALL CAPS but not because they were excited, but because they found it easier/faster to read messages IN CAPSLOCK. They weren’t yelling or expressing anything overly excited–they just typed IN ALL CAPS because of their eyesight.

ANYWAY! About dashes versus ellipses! When I was in secondary school exchanging fic with friends (late 90′s), I totally noticed friends using ellipsis in place of dashes to express when characters were interrupting each other! I was pretty confused too, because I’d read these characters as purposefully slowing down their speech and allowing the other characters to interject, whereas my friends read the lines much faster. Because to them, an ellipsis totally signaled the cutting off of speech! I have no idea where they picked that up from tbh–it was def not in the books I was reading.