What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
It’s about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely. The amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene. If you can’t bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way, I’m going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just won’t read it. And frankly, if what you’re saying is so boiler plate you don’t need punctuation, then you really don’t have anything to add, so probably just shouldn’t.
It’s about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely the amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene if you can’t bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way I’m going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just won’t read it and frankly, if what you’re saying is so boiler plate you don’t need punctuation then you really don’t have anything to add so probably just shouldn’t
Its about as annoying as young people abandoning any and all punctuation entirely the amount of people that will write an entire paragraph and not use a single period is obscene if you cant bother to organize your thoughts in the most minimal way Im going to assume you have nothing of worth to say and just wont read it and frankly if what you’re saying is so boiler plate you dont need punctuation then you really dont have anything to add so probably just shouldnt
Gonna need some examples methinks. But the tendency to overuse ellipses is right tf up there
What if I like ellipses…
…go on
…well…
Yes! This is what I always associate with older folks texting or emailing. I use ellipses a fair bit for (my attempts at) comedic effect. Some older folks are using them on a whole different level, having this weird habit of ending sentences with them where most people would use a period or exclamation point. It can come off sounding very ominous.
“Bill is coming over.”
Okay, cool. Have fun with Bill.
“Bill is coming over …”
Grandpa, are you in trouble? What’s Bill going to do???
I saw some video where they explained boomers use the ellipses to indicate missing words? like they’re acknowledging that it’s a sentence fragment and not a complete sentence.
That’s a little different: if you’re quoting someone and cut words out of the middle of the quote, you’d use … to indicate that you’ve modified the quote. It wouldn’t go at the end of a sentence though. It used to be pretty common in newspapers, as I recall.
so why are they using it at the end of a sentence if it’s not to indicate trailing off?
Indicating trailing off is another way to use it; that’s more literary vs the newspaper thing of indicating removed words. I wouldn’t expect anyone to use it to indicate removed words at the the of a sentence, because you could just end the sentence instead. But some people are weird.
That’s actually how the comment above interpreted the ellipses. The difference is more, why the words are missing.
The “modern” interpretation is that you are too annoyed or afraid to finish the sentence. In the sense of “son of a …” in case of annoyance.
The “old” interpretation is either temporal (I’m not finished writing) or simply an acknowledgement that the fragment is just a fragment.
So the modern reader will interpret much more context into the missing words, leading to the exchange above.
That kinda makes sense because that is the how it is intended to be used (from a punctuation perspective).
el·lip·sis noun the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.
Hmm, I’d always understood ellipses to mean a thought was trailing off, or as a written indicator of someone thinking as if taking a pause while speaking.
I was never taught that’s what it means, just seems that’s how most people use it.
I think schools stopped teaching it at some point. Legal docs are one of the places that use it as originally intended. And, I guess, older folks.
Wikipedia ….
Depending on context, ellipsis can indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight pause, an echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence.
I usually use it as “a slight pause” in my attempts at jokes, or to abbreviate a quote
I’m old and almost never use ellipsis and I will correct everybody’s punctuation and typography as a matter of principle (at least in my own language, not being confident enough with English rules to do it there).
Also ellipsis is a single character: … (it does take 3 keys though)
I’m old and i use ellipses frequently, but my family would understand that i mean -
Bill is coming over and you know i hate that fucker so please call or stop by to save me if you don’t hear from me in a bit.
I think your Grandpa is expecting you to infer something from the …
…from the what ??! say it, goddammit !
I’m old and I use … to indicate that I’m gonna continue that sentence, but because I’m slow to write, I give you a chance to participate/continue. Especially if the sentence is going to be long.
Bill is coming over…
Well that nice.
…but I can’t stand the fucker.
Oh.
Well, I’m old-adjacent and I literally don’t think either of my grandpas so much as touched a cell phone or computer in their lives, but I get your point.
I think your Grandpa is expecting you to infer something from the …
“What’s the matter?”
Nothing, just letting you know…
“Do you want me to come over?”
No, Bill is coming already…
“Oh, great! And?”
Just letting you know…
“Oh, ok. Have fun, then. Tell Bill I said hi!”
Will do…if I remember…
I am a younger millennial. I use ellipses all the time tbh. But I never use them at the end of a sentence like that. I tend to use them in the middle of a sentence often to break it up if it seems to long and I don’t want the formality of a semicolon.
Yeah, for me (an elder millenial), I use them in the middle of a sentence in the form of a dramatic pause, or sometimes at the start of a sentence in specific cases. I’m not saying any of this is necessarily grammatically correct (or that the boomers are wrong for how they use them), but this is just what feels closest to regular speech to me.
The thing with ellipses is… they make you sound… like you have lethargy… Either that… or extreme shyness… Whenever I see text with no other punctuation than ellipses…I always imagine… like I’m talking with Eeyore… from Winnie the Pooh…
Flash totally would text using ellipses.
For me it’s Christopher Walken.
For me it’s an old habit from IRC. Instead of sending 5/6/7 lines of text, I just cut it with … and continue typing on the same line. I could make complete sentences with capitals and periods but instant messaging is not a medium well suited for full sentences and paragraphs, so you get …
if you’re sending it in a single message the ellipses don’t make any sense. just use a single period, even of you don’t capitalize the beginning of the sentence. the ellipses thing is a contrivance that’s attempting to address a nonexistent problem in this case, and actually creates problems due to how most people interpret them.
if you’re rapid firing single sentences as individual messages in teams or something, the discrete message bubbles take the place of the ellipses. just don’t use any punctuation at the end of the sentence/message. also you’ll probably have people wanting to beat your face in with their phone that won’t stop vibrating.
“cutting it with ….” takes more keystrokes than a single period on your part, and leads to many people assuming you’re either a chronically stoned sloth or a sarcastic dick. i don’t understand why anyone who uses ellipses isn’t doing everything in their power to break that habit. someone needs to make a no ellipses site in the vein of nohello.net.
Give them their ellipses, and they shall grant you your no caps. Sigh.
The related thing that I’ve seen a few times and never understood is “,”. What does an ellipsis of commas even mean?
Too blind to tell the difference on a phone keyboard, too vain to wear glasses / update prescription
The first guy I saw doing that was actually on a keyboard a dozen or so years ago.
I think it means “I am starting to suffer the effects of long-term leaded gas exhaust exposure“.
Ah, that makes sense
Nope, I find people older than me are more likely to write with full grammar and the younger ones use internet-specific grammar.
This seems to stem from when we had dumbphones that didn’t even have T9 predictive spelling.
Meaning that if you just wanted to type a common message like “I am on the train, 25 min away” would mean pressing the following keys:
Empty spaces is use to indicate a slight pause.
4,4,4,0,2,6,0,6,6,6, ,6,6,0,8,4,4,3,3,0,8,7,7,7,2,4,4,4,*,*,0,2,2,2,2,5,5,5,5,0,6,4,4,4,6,6,0,2,9,2,9,9,9
I used t9 in high school. In retrospect it’s obviously unusably clunky, but I do miss being able to text totally blindly in my pocket or something.
I always read now and even back then people complaining about t9 and how shitty it is…
I don’t know, I loved it on my Sony Ericssons. The implementation of it was really nice.
Granted, I did use it on my native language, so maybe in English, it is shitty, but it was a must have thing to turn on for me after a while (when I discovered and realized how it works. before that, it was just some strange black magic)
Just started typing, and if I waited a bit, a list of words came up and could use the dpad or joystick to select a word. only annoying thing was a popup, if the word did not exists I was trying to type, but then I could just add it with two button presses and that’s it.
I tried using T9 from time to time, but it often sucked for me, probably because I needed to use it in Swedish and it wasn’t that well developed for it.
T9 was so bad that I don’t even understand that they threw these phones on the market.
I was there for the whole GSM phone era and the most obvious thing would have been to release a blackberry type thing with a slide out keyboard.
T9 just adapted the earlier lettering that phones already had on the numbers. ‘1-800-COL-LECT’ Never intended you to type it as ‘1-800-222666555-555332228’, you’d just dial 1-800-265-5328. but that’s what you’d have to do to write it with T9.
Well, that is not all it did, it had a dictionary to do predictive text, and the Swedish one was never really good.
The trend was to make the phone as small as possible and it would have been hard to do that with extra keys. You could make them smaller keys, but then it’s almost as hard to use just by virtue of being too tiny tiny to type on.
I always thought t9 was pretty great but I do remember it being frustrating when you needed to type something it was never going to get and it wasn’t always convenient to switch to regular keying temporarily.
ikr!
Other Stroke Symptoms
Watch for Sudden:
CONFUSION, trouble speaking or understanding speech
Good info to post! Actually, I like that this is now a thing to ask someone whose post is turned to gibberish by autocorrect: it keeps the idea in mind, should anyone need it in real life
For example?
From my experience, touch typing and using all fingers (home row technique I think it’s called) is less common among boomers, especially men. Even in professional settings I’ve seen men peck at their keyboards with just their pointer fingers. The slowness of this technique might explain the use of abbreviations at the desktop?
I’ve mostly seen the opposite. older people having taken typing classes while people who started typing very yound never got instruction and even if they had their hands would have been too small at the time. they do get pretty good WPMs though.
Early 2000s we started playing Typing of the Dead in our breaks so we could get the parts of work that needed typing done more quickly.
Still can’t type, I switched to swiping on phones the minute I could.
There’s probably some really weird graphs to be made of who hunts and pecks and who uses the home row
I don’t have the stats on it, but I suspect that up until about the 80s men would mostly hunt and peck, and women were a mixture, because a lot of secretaries and such who had to type professionally were women. As computers became bigger more men would start using the home row, peaking around the 90s/early 2000s when pretty much every milenial had computer/typing classes (although I know plenty of my millennial peers still hunt and peck) and now it’s on a bit of downward slope with Gen z/alpha who are more used to phones/iPads.
I work in 911 dispatch, it’s a bit of a thing I’ve noticed with our younger new hires, they’re somewhat less comfortable with keyboard/mouse controls than the rest of us (and for added confusion, we have trackball mice, a lot of them have never seen or used one before or an old mechanical mouse with a ball. A handful of them have barely used mice at all and are more used to laptop trakcpads and touch screens. They catch on pretty quick but there’s definitely a bit of a learning curve.
trackball mice
But why? These were never more popular than traditional mice
I don’t know the reasoning, I’ve always personally liked trackballs so I never questioned it
But if I had to hazard a guess, maybe because we each have 5 or 6 monitors, and it’s easier to just give the trackball a good spin when you have to go from one far edge to the other than it is to pick up and move your mouse a few times or to provide adequate desk space.
They’re supposed to be better at preventing RSI
RSI?
repetitive stress injury i think.
All of my kids messages are super short or emoji filled, my wife, friends and older contacts all text to text me full paragraphs or sentences.
Need some examples
Sounds like you’re a millennial with gen alpha kids. The latest generation is struggling to read and write, while millennials are the best typists
I blame msn messenger for my speedy typing.
Not exclusive to old people, unfortunately. I’ve seen many instances of texts from decidedly young people that make me question if the language being used was some derivative of Old English.
But to answer the question specifically, I generally find that old people have a higher tendency to type or use speech-to-text and then not check for accuracy. It makes it generally pretty common for autocorrect to completely mess up meaning of the message. Also older people seem to either spam or avoid punctuation entirely with no in between.
My mother would mistype and just accept whatever word was substituted in the autocorrect. So I’d receive messages like “what’s times area your striving art under Stevens’s on Saturdays”. Then I’d have to ring her, on the off chance she answered (only turned the phone on when expecting a call), so there wasn’t any point texting in the first place.
Haha aww that is me.
My mother is the opposite. She will make sure to correct every word even it it’s clear what it meant.
I meant „even if“ not „even it“
And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns? Every Sentence reads like the just read the Written Word for the first time and wanted to give It a Try For Themselves
For me. That’s usually autocorrect. If it decides a typo such as accidenta double-space means the end of one sentence, then capitalizes a word, it’s below my threshold to go back and fix. You shouldn’t be confused by random. Apitalization and letter skips from autocorrect, but I’ll correct it when it’s autocorrect sped to to something. Different like this last sentence where it looks like I’m having a stroke
My Android keyboard will automatically capitalize lots of common words like target, guess, even-- shit it’s not doing it now, it heard me thinking. I guess it’s brands, but some of them I don’t recognize. I’m going to be mad if it starts doing it again as soon as I leave this thread.
My phone insists on Land. Wtf, phone?
This happens to me when I add a word to the dictionary but it happened to be the first word of a sentence at the time I added it, so it got capitalized and now the dictionary thinks it’s a proper noun
I’m not as old as OP mentioned, but sometimes I’ll do it when it’s a word that’s commonly abbreviated or part of a title. Like “Original Poster”.
I’ve had a couple people ask me if I’m German, but no, I just like some of their ideas on capitalization.
And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns?
I’ll admit it’s a weird Habit.
Edit: Nouned.
This is the accepted writing style at my work, and it’s been driving me nuts for years. I’m talking about the copy we put on all our public facing materials. Even our resident linguists hate it, but apparently someone high up thinks it’s industry standard.
Remembering this just made me happier to be leaving soon. They’re so resistant to challenging entrenched habits. I should have seen these signs when I started.
I always capitalize words that locally mean something specific and technical. Like the Group a Record is associated with in the Student table.
Do you mean things like that? Or just capitalizing all Nouns for no Reason or Something silly?
Similar to that. Nouns that have a somewhat specific meaning in our business context, like Investor, Adviser, Product, Portfolio, etc.
In 18th century English they did the same Thing. German too. Nouns were more important
In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.
Older people who communicated over text before the internet only did this in one way - writing letters.
As a result their style of texting or emailing is often very long form in comparison.
When writing letters you are limited by how much room there is on a piece of paper.
This leads to using some shorthand which used to be fairly common, but has fallen out of public knowledge for younger people.
You could argue that some of the stuff that younger people email or text informally can be just as cryptic because there is entirely different shorthand that millenials and generations Y and Z use.
If you closely examine how you casually communicate with your peers of a similar age, you will notice it can be just as odd as what you experience from communicating with generations on either side of you.
Young people grew up with MSN and AOL… since when young is 40yos.
I’m over a decade away from 40 and I grew up with it.
Furthermore the context of the use of younger is in:
“In my experience, younger people who grew up with the internet write their texts and emails as if they are instant messaging, because they grew up with AOL and MSN messenger etc when it comes to text based communication.”
Which is replying to a post titled:
“What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?”
The use of “Younger” here is not an absolute term, it is a relative term, meaning it refers to people younger than the older people the original poster is referring to, who are in my estimation likely to be anyone under the age of 60 based on what OP describes and my informed experiences having worked in the IT industry supporting users of all ages.
…what do you mean…
45+ is “older people” to you?
In the US, the average life expectancy is 79.7 years old. Half of that is 39.87, and looking at demographics the median age is even lower.
So yes, 45 year olds are easily older than most people in the US at least. I think that’s a fair statement.
Stop scaring me. I don’t want to think about my death!!
Punctuation
And spelling.
And knowing that ‘e-mail’ never gets pluralized with an S, and a host of other simple things that were lost when they seemingly stopped having Grade 3.
We can drive a stick, make a campfire, tie a bowline or a splint and make an igloo and a lean-to. We fought with sticks, we wore no helmets and if we didn’t learn at school they held us back. Fear us.
So you would say that you received 3 e-mail today?
An eee-mail?
Did you also walk to school uphill both ways, barefoot on snow and broken glass?
no, they were our parents, and they never let us youngins (now around 50) forget it
damn bro you accidentally posted your facebook post as a lemmy comment.
Younger than 45
Oh OK that actually makes sense.
45 year olds and above are digital immigrants. In short, they had an off-line childhood and an online adulthood. They have different speech and writing patterns to you because they learnt and communicated in a different way to you.
Assuming you’re under 45, this won’t make sense, because you’ve never experienced a world which doesn’t have this sort of interaction. You’re a digital native, digital tech has always been there.
In twenty years time, children born or educated after the advent of chat gpt will have the same problem understanding you. The way you write, post and interact will seem clunky and old fashioned. It’s already happening!
The wonderful thing about humanity, tho, is that we adapt and adopt! Consider this - everyone over the age of 50 had to learn something completely new to them in order to be able to communicate with you like this. They used to just talk or write letters. That’s it.
Your timeline is straight up fucked. In short, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Take into account that those 45 and older were the ones with disposable income when the internet took off
We fuckin invented the digital world, and memes too!
Not sure who the “we” is in your post but Imo the biggest influence on meme culture was 4chan and similar dumpster fire communities of the early/adolescent Internet.
Yes and were in our 40s now. Those teenagers grew up, at least chronologically.
We’re kinda schizophrenic; working normal jobs during the day, but a part of our mind is still a snarky, sarcastic shitposter with a truly horrific sense of humour lol
