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 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
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.
I know that they’re weird, but they’re all doing it. there must be a reason. they must have been taught something in school
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…
Flash totally would text using ellipses.
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.
I specifically turned off my phones auto-capitalization setting because it was making me look ridiculous in my Discord group chats. I’ve turned it back on for you though.
It honestly was starting to annoy me when posting here though, as most people format their posts pretty nicely.
For me it’s Christopher Walken.
What if I like ellipses…
…go on
…well…
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“.
Ah, that makes sense
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.
Do you mean something like “x, y, …” ? That just means etc and saves you no time.
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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.
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.
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.
Apparently, reading full sentences with proper grammar makes them feel like they are having a stroke.
ikr!
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.
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
^ yes, this exactly. It was the equivalent of living on the dark net in the eves. Total Wild West.
Not all > 45 tho. I’d say 40-55 or so who were also “nerds” or “geeks” as kids.
Your timeline is straight up fucked. In short, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
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.
Mate, i’m 46. I literally see this day in and day out
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”?
“A certain way of communicating by text that is predominantly displayed by the geriatric population”
You don’t. It’s still a pointless unprovable stereotype.
Is it really unprovable? A quick search online for me reveals a lot of spilled pixels on the subject of how age is correlated with communication styles in various media. I think Gretchen McCulloch wrote about this even.
I don’t see why it’s bad to talk about these things. I’ll admit, OP’s language here was rather inflammatory. But some people say what you’re saying regarding ebonics, yet AAVE has become one of the biggest fields in linguistics today. “Stereotype” doesn’t necessarily mean “problematic to acknowledge.”
@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
I blame msn messenger for my speedy typing.
flash: scroll: Buying lobbies 200ea
RuneScape was just a series of typing exercises for me. Eventually I got an auto typer but I’d still throw in my own messages to try to throw off the bot detection
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.
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?
no, they were our parents, and they never let us youngins (now around 50) forget it
So you would say that you received 3 e-mail today?
An eee-mail?
I’m old enough to be a grandma (and not Boebert style) and “e-mail” is something my parents would write instead of “email”,
damn bro you accidentally posted your facebook post as a lemmy comment.
Never been called geriatrics before. I can retire now! Nice
@MissJinx @asklemmy I wasn’t sure of the right word to use. Geriatric seemed correct enough. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything especially wrong or bad about my elders. I just think there might be some kind of technological and cultural collision happening that makes me feel like I’m crazy sometimes.
Oh boy, I’m an “Elder” now. Gonna go kill myself realy quick
hahaha jokes aside I see your point. I’m full time online so I don’t have a problem but yes, I only had internet when I was 12yo and smartphones when I was past 25yo so we really don’t have the same education. Someone that is not online all the tine will have a hard time keeping up.
I don’t think that the internet even existed when I was 12 as anything other than dial-up modems and a collection of bulletin board systems. It wasn’t until I was in college that the ‘modern’ internet came online. I didn’t have my first “smart” phone–and I’m using that term very loosely–until I was in my 30s.
I also remember when Windows 3.1 came out, and oh boy, that was neat! Suddenly I didn’t have to program batch files to configure memory in order to play games!
What? Who are you communicating with, and what shortcuts are you talking about? I text with my kids and they use more shortcuts and abbreviations than I do.
In work emails, I try to think of the recipient when writing them. Some people are chattier and prefer a nice introduction and thorough explanation, but my boss likes to just see messages like:
Posted on 13-May, thanks.
So if that’s what you are talking about maybe you just have a more social communication style.
Though I will say my husband uses the ominous ellipses too often, like…
All the younger people I text with use more acronyms and abbreviations than I do. I even spell out okay.
I even spell out okay.
Which is funny, because it originated as an initialism for “Oll Korrekt”.
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.
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?
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
In 18th century English they did the same Thing. German too. Nouns were more important
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’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.
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
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.
“Couldn’t reply to message on Lemmy, was written like it was typed on a keyboard. Literally can’t right now. Too many words.”
What an asshole.
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
How about some examples sport?
@bitchkat @asklemmy Here you go: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/comment/794446
Cc’ing @Taleya and @AlternateRoute because they also asked.
“please give John my cell # so that he can send or re-send the travel info. He sent it when I was at urgent care house but it has disappeared—thanks”
This is a you problem. The sender communicated fine, they don’t have time to write you a formatted request like:
Hi, CrimeDad. I am in the urgent care facility having a severe medical problem and did not receive the travel information John sent. Could you please give him this cell phone number so he can send it to me? Thanks.
because they were in fucking urgent care.
“Lo, as I lay upon my sickbed, it came to my mind that Old John had not told me of his travel plans ere I fell sick. My trusted employee, will you go to him and ask of his plans, then send them forthwith unto my device, that I may learn of them before I die?”
I’m with you on this one then. What were they asking you to do?
@RBWells @asklemmy I had a party at my house and both my mom and my friend, John, came over. They had a conversation in which he told her about a good website for shopping for airline tickets and he emailed her the link. Subsequently, she couldn’t find the email, prompting her to ask me via the message I quoted. I didn’t know they had that conversation and it seemed like my mom was saying she had actually gone to urgent care.
The sender wanted the recipient to give their mobile number to John.
I don’t think this communication is overly weird or sounds like something an older person wrote. There is an autocorrected typo in there, but that happens with people of all demographics in my experience. Younger people also send somewhat ambiguously worded texts from time to time. I don’t see that as a generational thing…just a general communication issue that happens.
I don’t have difficulty communicating with older people at all over text and don’t generally notice a difference in communication style.
There are a few exceptions though…
Very old people or people that don’t understand how to use technology will sometimes communicate in a strange manner. If my dad wants to send me a paragraph, he sends me every single sentence as a separate text. At the end, he signs his text “Dad” in a separate message. He also can barely operate a phone or computer in general, but did manage to figure out how to use emojis which amused me.
Meanwhile, my mom is almost the exact same age as him. She knows how to use a computer and phone just fine and her texts are not at all strangely formatted or anything like that. She communicates exactly the same as other people I know from any other demographic…with the caveat that she uses less abbreviations than younger people generally do.
I’m a millennial and I’ll often use abbreviations like “tbh”, “atm” etc. over text, but I don’t generally see older people doing that. It doesn’t hamper communications between us though.
