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?
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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.
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.
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
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.
And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns?
I’ll admit it’s a weird Habit.
Edit: Nouned.
Phones auto capping
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.
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
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.
45+ is “older people” to you?
For example?
