Edit: A few people have interpreted the title as serious, so I wanna clarify that it was meant as a sarcastic joke about how little sense the neurotypical world makes to me, but it is still legitimately me asking for help understanding said neurotypical world.
Was having a conversation with a friend today about why I seem unapproachable to people online. Apparently it’s for 2 reasons.
One is that I say “K.” all the time, as a short way of saying okay. She pointed out that most people find this rude and offensive. This kinda baffled me, because like why? She explained that like, if somebody were to give a long emotional speech and I just responded “K.” that would be offensive. That confounds me. So it’s rude in one context, and neurotypicals have decided to be offended by it in all contexts? But the reason it’s rude is what confuses me more. Apparently it’s considered lazy because you could have just typed out the word, but like, that applies to all text speech and nobody’s mad about people shortening those words.
But it got more confusing when she explained the second reason, which is that I end all of my sentences with proper punctuation, which she said “makes people feel like I’m done with the conversation and not interested.” But just a second ago improper grammar was rude, and now proper grammar is rude instead.
It baffles me. You can’t just use proper or improper grammar. Use too much improper grammar and you’re lazy and rude. Use too little and you’re also rude. But you can’t just use any improper grammar, you have to use the very specific subset of improper grammar that’s been deemed acceptable and not lazy (even though it’s exactly as lazy as what they do consider lazy.)
To be clear, I’m not bitter, and I’m definitely gonna adjust my behavior to hopefully seem a little less rude to people. I think that’s just a nice thing to do. I just find the neurotypical mind utterly fascinating. I don’t think they even realize how many contradictions exist in the social rules they all so easily accept.
It baffled me too, but people have legit complained about this stuff to her and she’s had to explain to them that I just talk like that. She has no expectation of me to change at all because she already understands my intentions perfectly well, but she told me simply because she felt I should know people were complaining.
As far as the period thing, apparently it’s the last sentence I’m supposed to leave punctuation off of. I don’t get it tbh. I mostly talk to people in MMOs and over Discord and apparently when I add a period to the end of the last sentence it makes people feel like I’m trying to end the conversation. It makes sense to me that people think that, given that every time I did it they’d just stop talking, but why they think that is a mystery to me. She said she thinks it’s because they’re just not used to it.
So it seems to be some sort of linguistic peculiarity in that specific group. MMO players tend to be relatively sheltered, so it could have formed organically? This makes sense to me. It’s unlikely, but it sounds better than “let’s make shit up and fuck with him”.
I don’t know how I would handle this. Most people I play with online are even deeper in the spectrum than I am. Do me a favour, the next time they have an conversation, just throw a single punctuation in the chat and see how they react.
Maybe. I actually scrolled back through the Discord we’re in and only found exactly one other person who uses proper punctuation. Scrolling through my other Discord servers though and people use proper punctuation all the time. It does seem to be a thing that may be specific to this group.
Also coincidentally I actually did witness somebody send a message that was nothing but a single period earlier today, and the reaction was everybody briefly paused then continued on like nothing happened.
Whether it’s a localized phenomenon or a wider one, it’s still weird to me.
Single period usually means drama is happening, for some reason