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What about it makes it look passive aggressive? How would excluding punctuation make it not look passive aggressive?
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
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.
Texting used to be done with a number pad, so going as far as adding a period used to be a statement. Obviously we all have keyboards now, but I’m sure some of that still translates over to today.
Fair point, for T9 typing I can see that. I wouldn't expect millennials and zennials to have dealt with T9 much, though.
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! 😅
Does Lemmy need the double space? This isn't Reddit after all, and it's the only Markdown implementation I've seen with that requirement for line breaks.
It does indeed.
Huh, interesting.
I'm using Mbin and we don't need it, I just assumed Lemmy was the same.
Markdown also permits a trailing backslash to be a linebreak, as an alternative to the two trailing spaces.
yields
foo
bar
No, baron, I was just pointing out that there are lots of different rules depending on the medium and genre and participants. le sigh
'twas a haiku 😉
Ehhhhhh, it's missing a season!
Season of aggression!!
Leaving out unnecessary characters makes you type faster, that's also why people write u instead of you sometimes
For those of us who learned to type, typing u instead of you will take longer because of muscle memory. I'm using glide typing on a phone for this and I still had to slow down to type u instead of you.
Well you're used to writing "you" instead of "u" while texting (for the record, I also always write "you"). Similiarly, a lot of people (namely those who grew up with phones), are used to omitting full stops at the end of a message, so if someone does it it must be a conscious decision. See where I'm going with this? (Also it's not like people who use them are immediately sounding passive-aggressive, context matters)
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.
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.)
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.
I get that it's a common interpretation amongst a demographic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.