i just saw someone claim the cry-typing meme is problematic tm because it mocks people with stutters and it made me actually think about the meme and now i feel like i’ve cracked the fucking da vinci code, so now i’m going to write about it so i can get these fucking useless thoughts out of my head and do my fucking chores ok? ok here we go blast off
so like cry-typing does in fact mimic the speech patterns of a stutterer, that’s pretty obvious, like the whole reason it’s called cry-typing is because it sounds like someone who is crying while trying to talk but can’t breathe or stop shaking or whatever. but that wasn’t decided by The Meme, and making fun of crying is not the purpose of The Meme.
the origins of cry-typing is from shitty, manipulative people, who got confronted online for lying or being a dick or whatever, and so they decided to mimic the speech patterns of someone crying in an attempt to make everyone else believe that they were sincerely genuinely upset and apologetic. this is an obvious ploy to get themselves off the hook and get everyone else to let them keep doing shitty things with no consequences out of pity/guilt/embarrassment/sympathy/whatever.
and that is what the meme is making fun of. because talking and typing are two WILDLY different forms of communication. the problem with cry-typing being taken seriously is that typing IS NEVER HAPPENING LIVE.
like it’s the easiest thing in the world to just say shit without thinking, people say things that they themselves outright disagree with all the time, just because your mouth can go on autopilot and then the words are dissipated into the air as soon as they’re out. you can’t take them back or look at them afterwards, they’re just gone.
typing is literally the opposite. every single letter is an actual physical button that your hands had to deliberately apply pressure to in order to choose it. and you can see the words after they have been chosen. you can look at the whole thing all together, and you can look at every single line individually. and you don’t have to hit send as soon as you’re done typing. you have literally all the time in the world to re-read and edit to your heart’s content. and then, once you do decide to send those words you have chosen, that’s yet another button you have to mechanically press (or worse, there’s several of them, with mouse movement involved)
so like, making normal typos that would have been made anyway? sure. rushing a response out because you’re on a deadline, or you’re anxious to get your thoughts out? fine. shaking & can’t see through the tears? of course. it’s entirely believable that someone didn’t catch a mistake because they were so upset. but that sort of mistake is much more likely to be the nonsensical leaving out a whole word, or auto-correct turning fucks into ducks, rather than a handful of commas and slashes and extra letters and spaces and random capitalization thrown into a fully-formed sentence that would otherwise be perfect. cry-typing just doesn’t make sense, especially as a marker for true investment.
if anything, it’s the opposite. trying to apologize and sending out something that has loads of typos or exttRa Sy mbo;lss for drAma..tic eff ecct/ just tells me that either you were just throwing shit out there without thinking about how it would be received, or again, the “mistakes” were done deliberately to illicit sympathy, neither of which say to me that you actually care about your apology.
which is the point of The Meme, making fun of manipulative people who hold the ridiculous belief that people who speak with a stutter also type with a stutter, and thus using their own false marker of “sincerity” as a marker of sarcasm instead. i.e. saying that you’re so sorry that you “misgendered” someone’s dog, but using cry-typing, thus indicating that you are not sorry at all, or that the other person’s concerns don’t matter to you.
the point is that you can just type anything and believably fake any emotion you want without needing to actually feel that emotion. at least with talking you have to be a bit of an actor. the meme just doesn’t work IRL.
anyway i know some ppl with muscle spasms and motor control problems and stuff like that might have both a stutter AND a tendency to typo, but stutters are typically on sounds that require lots of tension and control of the mouth, like consonants, whereas a typo is just as likely to be seven E’s in the word cheese, or cape instead of cap. so i’m still a little mystified how someone thought making fun of cry-typing was actually making fun of people who stutter with their mouth ???????????
team rocket is blasting off again
