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?
Gonna need some examples methinks. But the tendency to overuse ellipses is right tf up there
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’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 …
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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…
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.
The related thing that I’ve seen a few times and never understood is “,”. What does an ellipsis of commas even mean?
I think it means “I am starting to suffer the effects of long-term leaded gas exhaust exposure“.
Too blind to tell the difference on a phone keyboard, too vain to wear glasses / update prescription
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 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.
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.
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 - we’re having to adapt the way we interact, in order to be able to ‘be understood’ by AI.
The wonderful thing about humanity, tho, is that we do 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 via email, sms or messaging app. They used to just talk, or write letters. Sharing media was a physical act. Yet here they are using the same texh as you. Awesome.
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.
Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
What always makes me laugh about posts like this is the knowledge that soon you too will hit that terrible 45 and become “geriatric”. Your text messages and emails (how quaint) will suddenly become incomprehensible and everyone will claim you are giving them a stroke just by existing <rolls eyes>.
The clock is ticking… faster than you think.
That’s an incredibly bad faith reading.
Anyone younger than 45 is going to have greater digital exposure and be more adept at electronic communication. The older you are, the less likely you are to be frustrated with how geriatrics communicate because the more familiar pre-digital communication styles will be to you.
I’m well aware that I’m somebody else’s elder. I meant it matter-of-factly, like “geriatric pregnancy”.
a) You made a gross generalization that cannot be attributed to a particular age group in a consistent, reproducible manner. “Old” in itself is of course an imprecise term use primarily in relative terms.
b) If as you assert, then you used the term incorrectly. The commonly accepted medical definition of “geriatric” is 65 years or older. When used in a general way to mean “aged” it is not “matter-of-fact” but a generalization and by it’s nature relative.
What you really mean is “people older than me that I find annoying” similar to “boomer” or, in your case, your specific non-factual and colloquial use of “geriatric”.
IOW, attributing your annoyance to some vague age group is roughly as ridiculous as attributing your annoyance to the color T-shirt someone is wearing. Or what country they come from, race they are… etc etc etc. It’s a pointless, meaningless, and often highly localized stereotype.
It’s not the attributes of the person, it’s the behavior.
I’ve observed the same thing. The phenomenon is real, even if it’s a generalization. How would you communicate this idea in a polite way? “A certain way of communicating by text that is predominantly displayed by the geriatric population”?
@enbyecho @asklemmy Well, geriatric pregnancies start at age 35, so it’s really a flexible adjective. If you took it incorrectly, that’s on you.
Based on the mixed responses I’m getting, it is not an established stereotype that older people write emails and text messages poorly. If I knew it was then I wouldn’t have asked if others had similar experiences to mine in the first place.
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
