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 post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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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.
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And why do old people randomly capitalize nouns?
I'll admit it's a weird Habit.
Edit: Nouned.
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...what do you mean...
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.
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.
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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
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From my experience, touch typing and using all fingers (home row technique I think it's called) is less common among boomers, especially men. Even in professional settings I've seen men peck at their keyboards with just their pointer fingers. The slowness of this technique might explain the use of abbreviations at the desktop?
There's probably some really weird graphs to be made of who hunts and pecks and who uses the home row
I don't have the stats on it, but I suspect that up until about the 80s men would mostly hunt and peck, and women were a mixture, because a lot of secretaries and such who had to type professionally were women. As computers became bigger more men would start using the home row, peaking around the 90s/early 2000s when pretty much every milenial had computer/typing classes (although I know plenty of my millennial peers still hunt and peck) and now it's on a bit of downward slope with Gen z/alpha who are more used to phones/iPads.
I work in 911 dispatch, it's a bit of a thing I've noticed with our younger new hires, they're somewhat less comfortable with keyboard/mouse controls than the rest of us (and for added confusion, we have trackball mice, a lot of them have never seen or used one before or an old mechanical mouse with a ball. A handful of them have barely used mice at all and are more used to laptop trakcpads and touch screens. They catch on pretty quick but there's definitely a bit of a learning curve.
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I've mostly seen the opposite. older people having taken typing classes while people who started typing very yound never got instruction and even if they had their hands would have been too small at the time. they do get pretty good WPMs though.
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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 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.
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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 ...
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.
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Other Stroke Symptoms
Watch for Sudden:
CONFUSION, trouble speaking or understanding speech
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