do people actually see punctuations as passive aggressive if someone is worried about that they should stop texting people for a while. passive aggressive would be the tone of the text sent, making some kind of criticism, or belittling, ignorance.
If you insist on interpreting my use of punctuation in a text as anything other than an effort to communicate clearly, I’m likely to start being passive aggressive at some point.
“Ah, an em-dash. You must be an AI.”
None. Modern smartphones have put periods in automatically for so long that anyone bitching about it is just abusively making shit up.
An ellipsis, on the other hand, is passive aggressive. It … always… implies that something has been omitted. Such as the profanity in the prior sentence.
I’ll thumbs up when I like what you’ve said. That’s why the “like” button on every platform is a thumbs up symbol.
You never have to worry about me being passive aggressive and you’ll fucking know when I’m being aggressive.
It’s been this way for a long time. 20 years ago I was told I came off as angry in my texts. It took me a sec, but I figured out it’s bc i put periods at the end of the last sentence.
That sounds like a good plan. See you there
-vs-
That sounds like a good plan. See you there.
That doesn’t sound angry to me, but I suppose things are subjective.
Nah. It’s not subjective. It’s the result of fucking imbeciles that don’t read.
That was meant to be angry because taking correct punctuation as some sort of slight is stupid as shit.
imbeciles that don’t read
…imbeciles who don’t read
You threatening me??
Uh, just in general, people tend to react horrifically to long messages, ‘walls of text’.
… even on discussion boards, like here on lemmy, or as a first intro message to someone on some kind of dating app/site.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.
It did not used to be like this.
People thought of messages as letters, like emails.
Now, a lot of people will get viscerally angry or disgusted in basically nearly any digital context if you send a message that’s longer than roughly double the original Twitter character limit.
Hooray for normalizing slogans and soundbites in lieu of actual discourse, hooray for kicking off the trend of destroying our collective capacity to read multiple paragraphs at a time, great job Dorsey.
I’ve been using the internet since the mid 90s.
It did not used to be like this.
A high proportion of people on the Internet in the mid-90s were associated with tech or universities and were comparatively well-educated. It was not a representative slice of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.
The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and learned to observe the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users.
The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year university students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their university campuses. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year.
And that’s just college freshmen.
Internet access today is more universally-available. I’d say that it’s just a product of seeing society as a whole writing.
A lot of what people read in, say, the 1980s was from mass media. That generally had a journalist — a professional dedicated to writing — and an editor checking their work. Those people probably had gone to college specifically to pick up writing skills, and likely spent a large portion of their professional lives writing. They had a high level of expertise relative to the population as a whole in that field. Now what you’re reading is often without that filter. It’s not that people in society changed. It’s that you’d never seen society’s writing; you’d just been reading what experts put out.
It’d be like most of what you’d seen your whole life was furniture created by professional carpenters, and then suddenly every Tom, Dick, and Harry was creating their own furniture.
I remember staring at YouTube comments when YouTube first came out and thinking “good God, these are terrible”. Randall Munroe, who clearly had the same reaction, did a whole cartoon about it:
https://lemmy.today/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Fyoutube.png
The answer, of course, isn’t that YouTube users are unusual. It’s that the people who watch videos are more-representative of society than those who are writing and reading long-form text on Usenet or whatnot. That comes as a sudden and abrupt shock if you’re used to reading that Usenet stuff. That is, you’d been in a bubble, and that bubble went away.
Randall worked at NASA. If you work at NASA and are accustomed to conversation among a bubble of what people who work at NASA say about space and then abruptly get thrown into an environment where people who don’t work at NASA are talking about space, I expect that it’s pretty shocking.
I remember also reading about what happened when email entered into businesses. It kind of mirrored this. For a long time, it was kind of expected that executives would have a secretary, because doing things like typing wasn’t as widespread a skill and correcting errors on a typewriter was more time-consuming than it is today on a computer. A manager would likely at least get access to some sort of shared secretary, even if they didn’t merit a personal one. That secretary likely spent a lot of their professional life writing, and got to be pretty good at it. That secretary was probably a lot better at writing than the typical person out there. Then businesses generally decided that with email, a lot of this dedicated-secretary overhead wasn’t necessary, and arranged to have people just write their own memos. They promptly discovered that a lot of people high up in their org charts had very little ability to write understandably (probably in part because they’d been relying on secretaries to clean everything up for years), and for some years after email showing up in businesses, having training to remediate this was apparently something of a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarial_pool
A secretarial pool or typing pool is a group of secretaries working at a company available to assist any executive without a permanently assigned secretary. These groups have been reduced or eliminated where executives have been assigned responsibility for writing their own letters and other secretarial work.
After the widespread adoption of the typewriter but before the photocopier and personal computer, pools of typists were needed by large companies to produce documents from handwritten manuscripts, re-type documents that had been edited, type documents from audio recordings, or to type copies of documents.
Is all this a bad thing?
Well…the Internet has democratized communication. It means that everyone has a voice. It’s got pros and cons. It’s changed how politicians communicate (Trump being a good example). It means that it’s easier to get material out there, but that the material doesn’t have a filter on it that might have been useful.
I think that it might well be the case that the average person today probably writes a lot more than they did in the past, because electronic communication enables written text to be so-readily and quickly transmitted. I’d wager that the average level of writing experience is higher today than in 1995. It’s just that you’re seeing a higher proportion of Average Joe’s writing than Jane the Journalist’s writing than you might have in 1995.
This is even bleeding over into professional email. I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I’ve taken to highlighting the important things, so they’ll at least feel like they can reliably skim.
I’ve noticed that if I send more than a few paragraphs, the recipient won’t actually read any of it.
I was reading an article about how some people were using LLMs to generate longer emails with more fluff to make it look like they were putting more work into their emails, and how other people were having LLMs summarize emails that had been sent to them to cut out excessive fluff because it was wasting their time.
One can but imagine what the end game of all this is.
Many people are only semi literate. This cuts two ways- many people struggle with reading longer text, but they also struggle with composing longer text.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing. Like, a low grade for English Composition 101. Now, remember that most people don’t have even that much training, and don’t practice on their own in ways that encourage (what’s traditionally considered) good writing.
I think this is part of why some people love chatgpt. They’re poor at writing, and now there’s a tool that purports to fix that problem without all the pesky work of practicing and learning.
I’ve generally worked in tech with rather educated people, but even there the lower portion of their writing skills can be disappointing.
I’m pretty sure that education helps. I used to hang out on /r/Europe, which had a lot of non-native English speakers…but who were generally very well educated (probably because of the sort of people who are going to be hanging out on an international forum and writing in some language that often isn’t their native tongue). The quality of the writing was pretty darn good. I’d say that the Dutch users there in particular wrote exceptionally clean English.
That said, it was an interesting experience, because I discovered that there are completely different categories of errors that native and non-native speakers make. For example, I’ve seen plenty of native speakers here in the US confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, probably because they learned to speak the terms long before they wrote them and then kind of mentally linked them in the interim. I virtually never saw that error on /r/Europe, probably because a lot of Europeans learned to write English relatively-early compared to learning to speak it. But I did see a higher proportion of people having problems with some errors that aren’t common among native speakers:
-
Words where English has one word that passed through different languages and then entered English as two different words (e.g. bloc and block).
-
Headlines. Until spending time on that forum, I was basically oblivious to the fact that headlines in English use very different grammar, a different set of conventions, than standard English. I’d grown up reading them, internalized them, never thought about it. Then I wound up on a ton of posts with people in /r/Europe complaining that the submitted headline for an article was completely nonsensical or unreadable. To me, the headlines seemed completely reasonable; at first I thought that users were just joking. Took me a while to realize what was going on. I couldn’t even find any websites that provided a full summary of all of the headline-specific grammatical conventions, just some that had some common examples.
-
Words that have irregular prefixes. For example, someone might write “uncompatible” or “noncompatible” instead of “incompatible”. English has many different prefixes that can mean approximately “not”, (“a-”, “un-”, “anti-”, “non-”, “in-”, “im-”, “ir-”, “ex-”). Just have to memorize them, kind of like grammatical gender in some other languages. I’ve rarely seen native speakers not know the right irregular prefix, but that was an extremely-common error to see on /r/Europe.
-
Specifically for Slavic language users, I saw some users having trouble with definite/indefinite articles (something that doesn’t exist in Slavic languages and is actually fairly uncommon in languages globally) or using gendered pronouns where one wouldn’t in English (modern English has only the tiniest remaining vestiges of grammatical gender).
Also, it was interesting to see where errors did crop up — my impression was that it tended to be with French or maybe Spanish speakers. My guess is that that’s because those languages are the other European languages that are also (relatively) widely-spoken around the world, and so by using English, you expand the pool of people you can talk to the least; I’d guess that people who speak these other languages use English less. For Spanish, it’s maybe a factor of 3. For French, maybe a factor of 5. Compare to something like Icelandic, where it’s something like a factor of 4,000.
-
ChatGPT also dramatically worsens the problem.
It just does the writing and reading for you.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
Its turning people into something akin to zombies, more or less. Either that or maybe just trying to think of it as some new kind of addiction or mental disability would be a more apt comparison?
I… its baffling, I can barely comprehend how significant and widespread this problem is… when I was in elementary school, I finished assignments and such so fast, with such frequency, that I would get assigned to go out into the hallway and help other kids who were struggling with reading skills, I’d help them read through books, sound out words, explain what they mean.
Thats my point of reference here, I’m back in 2nd grade, helping (probably dyslexic) 4th graders learn how to read.
So you then just… never develop any actual reading or writing skills.
This is one of the scary parts, yes. Reading and writing are fundamental skills that will atrophy if not practiced. Combined with anti-intellectualism, where people fundamentally do not value reading and writing skills, it’s pretty nasty.
I don’t know how to fix it. It’s a gap in values. I often find myself wondering about the people around me, “Why don’t you care?” I don’t know why they don’t care about things.
Why don’t they care?
… The reliance on machines to do their thinking has more or less made them into actual NPCs.
First it was the combined effect of all of the media machines of capitalism, providing so many distractions and distortions.
Now… its much more direct, formidable, capable… total.
Just go look into the number of people who’ve killed themselves or others after more or less being goaded or gaslit into by… their only friend, ChatGPT.
Its realworld cyberpsychosis, from Cyberpunk 2077.
Now you’ve got me wondering when tldr became a thing on the internet
to the best of my memory, at least in my experience, i think it originated on, or perhaps was popularized on early reddit, like, pre 2010, perhaps earlier in other forums?
i guess i would not be surprised if it actually originated on tumblr and then made its way to reddit, but yeah, i think i remember it basically ‘becoming a thing’ roughly around 2008ish? On reddit?
Ah fuck, apparently its first recorded usage was on usenet in 2002.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TL%3BDR
I may have been using the internet since the 90s, but I also was under the age of 10 for most of the 90s, so… yeah I did not exactly know as much about usenet, as say… gamefaqs, and neopets lol.
I blame the early stages of texting when the dawn of cellphones began, when they became more easily accessible.
Then, I blame Twitter and Facebook for character limits. So, it forced people to dumb down everything they try to talk about.
Then, I blame TikTok/Vine/YouTube Shorts for even worsening the attention span of people.
So now it’s like, if you attempt to explain things in great detail, you’ll get one or both reactions. One being, people being snarkily towards you about how the post is at length and it is one thing for your post to be a giant blob of text with no structure. Nobody likes reading that, even I don’t like reading that and I can get wordy.
The other reaction are people who just complain, bitch, moan and cry about how long the post is.
It did not used to be like this.
I don’t know about that. I’ve been involved in a lot of long form debate/arguments on forums back in the day and every time you saw a wall of text you had to roll your eyes.
The only difference is we all used to read it all back then. Maybe we just tolerated it better when we were younger.
The world is getting dumber by the day. It’s a period. It ends the sentence, you are a moron if that bothers you.
People have given me grief for use of commas. They help break sentences so things don’t seemingly go on and on. That’s what they’re used for, to let you know about where a break is and it is about voicing it in your mind in how it’d sound.
But people don’t have that capability I guess, so they whine.
It works. I can tell you are annoyed because you ended your last sentence with a period. Otherwise I would have had no idea.
Man, that must suck to be so incredibly insecure that you project your need for constant validation on to, quite literally, the most innocuous thing.
Yeah, I also don’t think it’s only about the full stop. It’s not like they’re using semicolons.
⸮Or even the percontation point. And I don’t see any interrobang‽
This is a stupid rule and I will continue to ignore it.
Anyone holding this view can get in the sea
Equally moronic as saying the letter “e” is passive aggressive
It’s not that EVERY full stop is passive aggressive, it’s about interpreting tone.
So for example, when I text my parents and say, “Thank you for the invite, we’d be happy to come over for dinner next Monday!” and my dad replies, “Great.” That looks passive aggressive.
He doesn’t mean it that way, tone interpretation from short texts just isn’t something he’s fluent in like those of us who’ve been texting (or IMing back before texts) most of our lives.
If he had said “Great” that would be fine, as would “Great!” But “Great.” is interpreted as sarcastic and/or passive aggressive.
The boomer triple period is even worse.
Thank you for the invite, we’d be happy to come over for dinner next Monday!
Great…
My dad does that a lot, and it’s so weird to me
If he does it when he is excited you might let him know about exclamation marks.
Maybe he is trying to be sarcastic.
Nope, just his normal way of talking.
Read an article a while back which explained why they probably do it, and while I don’t think it’s the one I read back than this one does a pretty good job.
TLDR: for older generations it’s a way of separating thoughts most likely leftover from postcards, whereas for the younger ones it looks like something is being (ominously) left out.
It’s not that EVERY full stop is passive aggressive, it’s about interpreting tone.
If he had said “Great” that would be fine, as would “Great!” But “Great.” is interpreted as sarcastic and/or passive aggressive.
Ok, zoomer.
and my dad replies, “Great.” That looks passive aggressive
What about it makes it look passive aggressive? How would excluding punctuation make it not look passive aggressive?
The fact that their dad was (possibly?) raised in an era when children were taught to read and write correctly is what makes it passive aggressive…
and just laziness inculcated by Internet/mobile/meme culture.
It’s the explicit inclusion of period where ‘normally’ there wouldn’t be one. In texting or DMs it would normally be assumed that one-liners wouldn’t contain punctuation except to enhance effect, so the inclusion of the full stop is being read as a 😐 or exaggerated neutrality
It’s the explicit inclusion of period where ‘normally’ there wouldn’t be one.
But given the larger history of textual communication, full punctuation is normal. Texting isn’t charged per character so it’s not like there’s a benefit to leaving it out.
Texting isn’t charged per character anymore, and only in most places most of the time. And those habits may still persist in other places. My manner of ‘speech’ is very different in front of a keyboard vs on a phone, for instance.
dude/ette
read some fukan poetry OK thanks
If poetry text
Is how you commune with friends
Passive aggressive.edit: fixed the formatting, and my keyboard unironically took my double-tap on space to add periods for me! 😅
and my keyboard unironically took my double-tap on space to add periods for me!
Markdown also permits a trailing backslash to be a linebreak, as an alternative to the two trailing spaces.
foo\ baryields
foo
barNo, baron, I was just pointing out that there are lots of different rules depending on the medium and genre and participants. le sigh
Leaving out unnecessary characters makes you type faster, that’s also why people write u instead of you sometimes
My phone keyboard adds so many unwanted periods, sometimes between every word.
I use Anysoft Keyboard on Android, and it has a toggle for that behavior, which I have off. I don’t know which software keyboard you’re using, but you might check whether it has such a toggle.
I don’t know anything about texting then. I would have been happy they responded.
What about it makes it look passive aggressive?
Good question!
As I explained later in the post, “Great.” looks like sarcasm. My brain interprets it as having a sarcastic tone, and thus being passive aggressive.
(I am not alone in this, hence the very thing we’re commenting on.)
How would excluding punctuation make it not look passive aggressive?
You might as well ask why tone of voice changes the way we interpret things. Written short-form communication has evolved cultural norms that some people understand better than others, just like spoken communication. Chalk my tone interpretation up to an adolescence spent on IRC.
My point is that the full stop being passive aggressive is contextual. None of my uses of it here are intended to portray passive aggression or sarcasm, and if I wanted to do that I would not only change my sentence length and structure, but also my vocabulary.
But of course these norms aren’t as readily understood as actual tone of voice, which is why things like “/s” can be useful.
First off, thanks for humoring me.
As I explained later in the post, “Great.” looks like sarcasm. My brain interprets it as having a sarcastic tone, and thus being passive aggressive. (I am not alone in this, hence the very thing we’re commenting on.)
I get that it’s a common interpretation amongst a demographic.
You might as well ask why tone of voice changes the way we interpret things
Eh, vocal changes carry actual physical changes in the sound waves which non-hearing-impaired persons can perceive, so I don’t quite think it’s an apt comparison. But I understand your intent in doing so.
But of course these norms aren’t as readily understood as actual tone of voice, which is why things like “/s” can be useful.
Precisely why it seems odd to me to interpret the use of the basic of punctuation whose literary meaning hasn’t ever carried an absence of express indicator of emotional intent to be negative.
Again, thanks for engaging with me on it, even though I still don’t get it.
I think it is because short form texts like IMs/SMS/irc are more like spoken language than written language. And if somebody talks to you and ends a sentence with “period”, the meaning/feeling of the sentence changes.
I can see how someone literally putting the word “period” at the of a sentence gives it a certain tone. But the meaning of a period is that the sentence is ended.
It also depends so much on context. My dad texting “Great.” in that text would be different than me texting my work friend:
Them: Paul called out again
Me: great.
Yes. Correct. Accurate.
Wow. What a good question.
Thanks.
In my mind, the full stop “sounds” like dropping the voice at the end, like you do at the end of a sentence.
And in speech, dropping the voice at the end of “Great” would sound sarcastic.Whereas an exclamation mark “sounds” high-pitched and excited.
And no punctuation is so normal in text that my mind “adds” the expected sign at the end, which after “Great” would be an exclamation mark.
It’s really hard to explain, I hope I’m making sense.
I would be far more likely to interpret someone I didn’t know who texted great without a period to be sarcastic.
It seems like deviation from their normal pattern would have some meaning, but without context all of these could be read as sarcastic depending on what kind of reaction someone might be expecting.
great
great.
great!
Every time universal signs of people being passive aggressive is explained to me the person who thinks these tiny signs like the exact way someone interacts mean it is passive aggressive they are wrong.
All of the examples apply to either individuals or a specific subset of people. I have relatives who do one thing that is passive aggressive, but when everyone else does the same thing they are just interacting normally. Saying that the shit those relatives do is always a sign of being passive aggressive is not true, it is only in the context of those relatives and other people who might be passive aggressive in the same way.
So for example, when I text my parents and say, “Thank you for the invite, we’d be happy to come over for dinner next Monday!” and my dad replies, “Great.” That looks passive aggressive.
Ugh, that is reading way too fucking much into how someone types text. Maybe it reads that way because it stands out as different from the normal way he types, but if he always ends with a period it would look completely normal!
If you interpret “Great.” as “passive aggressive”, you are nuts. It simply is correct grammar, something kids seem to be unaware of nowadays.
The different context means it’s not a literary communication, but notation for casual speech.
More script or score than Strunk and White.
In that mode, punctuation is performative, and with a period after one word you should weigh heavily on a grim tone of voice, or perhaps sarcasm.
As an old fart and former editor, context is key: there are many modes of expression, and the rules vary.
It simply is correct grammar, something kids seem to be unaware of nowadays.
What a boomer take. I could just as well say that the “kids” seem to be more aware of the use of punctuation in text messaging and the implied emotion they convey
I disagree with your entire take.
it’s about interpreting tone.
Kinda feels passive aggressive, idk man
That’s silly, and at the very least probably gonna cause unconscious bias to second language speakers, neurodivergent people & just anyone who doesn’t communicate via text as much as we do
That’s silly
I don’t know what to tell you, communication is complicated. A lot of this is subconscious.
and at the very least probably gonna cause unconscious bias to second language speakers, neurodivergent people & just anyone who doesn’t communicate via text as much as we do
I agree, which is why it’s important for us to understand context and to attempt to interpret what the other person says in the best light.
I didn’t think my dad was actually being sarcastic when he replied that way. His text conveyed a tone he didn’t intend, just like when my neurodivergent ass says something in a tone of voice harsher than I intend.
This is no different from spoken communication, except there we get additional clues about neurodivergence and/or linguistic familiarity.
I didn’t think my dad was actually being sarcastic when he replied that way. His text conveyed a tone he didn’t intend, just like when my neurodivergent ass says something in a tone of voice harsher than I intend.
Both of those are people inferring meaning that isn’t there. I would bet money you didn’t say stuff in a tone of voice harsher than you meant, they just didn’t like what you were saying and read way too much into it.
In what way is that passive agressive? That is so weird. I simply ignore tone on the internet or texts. There is not any. Just words. They said great it means great. That’s it.
And I have been sending messages most of my life, and it is a simple rule: there is no tone in texts or messages.
I don’t think the issue is his fluency in interpreting tone but you’re just interpreting it differently. In this case you’re misinterpreting it since he didn’t mean to be passive aggressive
I’m not saying that’s the interpretation I walked away with. Context is important. I knew my dad wasn’t being sarcastic, just read that way. It made me laugh, it made my wife laugh!
It’s like back when some people didn’t realize all caps meant yelling and they would go around with caps lock on until they had it explained to them.
deleted by creator
Where periods?
You don’t have to use them
Just don’t go making stuff up about people’s intentions when they do
Wha kind of stupid shit is this? Full stops in texts is passive aggressive?
How is that even done?
And how is it construed as passive aggressive? What kind of fucking idiot thought this up?
If you don’t respond to something in the next 2 minutes, then you’re ghosting.
I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned. I still put two spaces after a full stop.
But I digress. The question was about other unwritten rules of texting. Over the past year, it’s become frowned upon at my company (a multinational with around 130k employees) to use the default yellow emoticons. People are gently reminded to use the colour that most closely resembles their skin. This is for conversations over Teams and Slack.
My mom uses the white smiley faces and I always feel like they are vaguely racist.
I have conflicted feelings about it.
On one hand, I can see how in some circles it could be some sort of racist dog whistle, but on the other hand when a lot of people are using other skin tones and it’s mostly white people using yellow, it feels almost like default = white, and using the white skin tone pushes back on that a little.
Two spaces as a convention is due to the monospaced fonts in typewriters.
If you aren’t using a monospaced font it’s typographically awkward.
Being told they must match the skin of their emojis sounds kinda racist.
😹
Those would be emojis not emoticons.
I miss emoticons. I am so done with emojis.
As to the subject you posted about color, that is crazy.
Emoji is just Japanese for emoticon. You miss ASCII emoticons, and are tired of Unicode emoticons.
Suck. My. Dick.
Nothing passive about that.
Ok.
Very active statement.
This is the way. Fuck passive aggressive. Be aggressive aggressive.
This is a stupid rule and I do not use it. Sometimes I write something, add a period, and then decide not to write the next sentence. The period should not be interpreted as a secret message.
It does convey a certain finality
It just does.
