this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
91 points (76.9% liked)

Asklemmy

44148 readers
1396 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

@asklemmy

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

so why are they using it at the end of a sentence if it's not to indicate trailing off?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

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