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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
laytonandluke
ijsthee

One thing thats rlly funny to me abt dl6 is that there were 3 people in that elevator, one of em was the victim and one of em was the victims 9 yr old child, but the police were just like 'fuck dude theres no leads. Not a single lead. Where to even start' and then the dead guys spirit was like 'uhhh have you tried the 3rd guy?' like. Why did they have ro ask a spirit for that

omeruu
averagefairy

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

runawaymarbles

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

feynites

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

rileyjaydennis

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

owlmylove

ACTUALLY there’s already been a loose study of this! internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch talks about how different ages use and interpret ellipses differently in her recent book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

according to her, older internet users (let’s say 50+) are more prone to using separation characters, such as hyphens, ellipses, and strings of commas to visually separate one thought from the next. although younger internet folk tend to interpret such ellipses as semi-formal or passive aggressive, these separation characters were commonly used in postcards, recipes, and other informally written communiques where space is limited. birthday cards are good examples - “thank you for all the birthday wishes… great to hear from so many old friends…” etc.

as Gretchen explains; “Postcards and recipe cards have a couple key features in common with social media posts. They’re both written by a single person, without editing - not like a published cookbook or novel. Both provide a constrained space to write in, which encourages a certain breeziness, and both are often semipublic: directed at a specific person or two but implicitly viewable by a much larger group […] These similarities explain both the generic separation characters as well as the surprisingly rapid adoption of emoji by older groups in comparison to internet acronyms like ‘lol.’ Pre Internet people are faithfully reproducing the conventions of a genre they’re in but that their baffled younger audience has lost in our digital age.” (pg 98)

She goes into a ton of detail on different demographics (my loosely defined 50+ demographic is divided into Pre, Semi, and Old Internet People in the book, and that’s just the older people!!), what kinds of linguistic quirks they use, what sociocultural influences they’re channelling, and what modern comparisons (postcards = texts) we can use to better understand them. 10/10 best book if you’re interested in understanding why ur aunt says “that’s so funny,,,,”

summer-skye-64
kafkaesque-meat

Now that the dust has settled, I think it’s hilarious that neo nazis stormed the capital building with minimum resistance and still didn’t manage to accomplish shit.

Like there was no tear gas, no tanks, no rubber bullets, no white vans, nothing. They got into the capital building, armed, nothing in their way and like...stole a podium. Shot one guy. Got arrested. Were dismissed by their former allies as a false flag.

Fuckers basically had the red carpet rolled out for them and just went “well fuck now what do we do?”

benefitscrounger

it’s like they had no real plan beyond “storm the capital”, because they’re a bunch of fucking LARPers with shit for brains.

wehavecomeforyourprivateschools

Also cos they want to preserve and reinforce state power, so they're not exactly gonna trash the gaff. It was funny how even in that moment of lawlessness many walked through the lobby between the guide ropes lol fucking divs.

I like to think anarchists would ransack the place, even lifting the skirting boards and picture rails for the revolution. The stuff you could take from there is unreal. Just the canteen alone, and the vending machines. Loot them friggers straight away.

summer-skye-64
afloweroutofstone

One of many big questions from last night: to what extent was this a massive failure on the part of the police, and to what extent was it intentional complicity

afloweroutofstone

I was at a handful of BLM protests in front of the White House last summer. This can not be emhpasized enough: if they treated the Trumpists the same way they treated BLM, they would have opened fire.

afloweroutofstone

image
fueledbystarkbucks

Remember, protesting is only a crime when it’s against President Emperor God King Trump.

arctic-hands

Protesting has been a crime long before trump. Bush enacted "free speech zones" in which if you didn't protest right there out of the way you would be arrested. And we're kidding ourselves if we said that's the start of it.

[Image Description: tweet from Molly Crabapple, verified, @ MollyCrabapple. It says "On January 20, 2017, the day off Trump's inauguration, police kettle 217 anti-trump protesters in the freezing cold and arrested them after sixteen hours.

Prosecutors then tried to put them in prison for 70+ years, on the accusation that all of them collectively broke a window." End ID]

fueledbystarkbucks

My input was mainly a snarky comment at how there’s quite the double standard, but...

Thank you for that contemporary history lesson! Much appreciated.

arctic-hands

Oops sorry. Not to be a cliche, but I don't recognize snark before my caffeine intake.