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 likeĀ āwhat the actual hell?ā and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didnāt 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 sheās using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create āmore space between wordsā because it ājust looks better to herā. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ādownswingā, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesnāt. 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:
āYay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?ā
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
āYay. That sounds greatā¦ where are we meeting?ā
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like āhappy/approvalā to my eye, whereas my motherās 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,Ā āditzyā andĀ āloudā. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when Iām constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why IĀ āwrote like an airhead who never learned proper Englishā 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 motherās generation by and large didnātĀ 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, soĀ āconversational writingā was not a thing she had to master.Ā
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like weāre scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like sheās 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 sheās writing, itās always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and notĀ along the lines ofĀ āhow would this sound if you said it out loud?ā
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