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?
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 âwhat the actual hell?â and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didnât 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 sheâs using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create âmore space between wordsâ because it âjust looks better to herâ. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate âdownswingâ, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesnât. 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:
âYay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?â
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
âYay. That sounds great⌠where are we meeting?â
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like âhappy/approvalâ to my eye, whereas my motherâs 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, âditzyâ and âloudâ. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when Iâm constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I âwrote like an airhead who never learned proper Englishâ 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 motherâs generation by and large didnât 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 âconversational writingâ was not a thing she had to master.Â
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like weâre scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like sheâs 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 sheâs writing, itâs always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of âhow would this sound if you said it out loud?â
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