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’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.
…from the what ??! say it, goddammit !
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 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.
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 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.
What if I like ellipses…
…go on
…well…
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 …
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
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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.
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.
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.
Your timeline is straight up fucked. In short, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
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
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
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?
In 18th century English they did the same Thing. German too. Nouns were more important
And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns?
I’ll admit it’s a weird Habit.
Edit: Nouned.
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.
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.
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.
Did you also walk to school uphill both ways, barefoot on snow and broken glass?
So you would say that you received 3 e-mail today?
An eee-mail?
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.
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“
Haha aww that is me.
…what do you mean…
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That’s an incredibly naive answer.
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.
@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.
Other Stroke Symptoms
Watch for Sudden:
CONFUSION, trouble speaking or understanding speech
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
Assuming you’re under 45, this won’t make sense, because you’ve never experienced a world
Nah. 45 is '78/'79. You can easily run up to '85 on the analogue migration
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.
