Ask Lemmy

I'm tired of people reading text from me, interpreting emotions that don't exist, then getting mad at me for it.

Don't know. Don't care. Playing games about hidden meanings gets me to stop texting you.

The last time I was dating someone, she texted me to ask if we were still on for our date the next day. I replied with a thumbs up emoji and some additional text saying I was excited about seeing her again.

When we got together for the date, she asked if I was mad at her about something. I didn't understand, so I asked why she would think that. She explained that the thumbs up emoji is used as a passive aggressive insult now.

👍

Reading in emotions to text to such an extent that normal punctuation is seen as a negative is rather juvenile.

There's actually a name for people who perceive proper punctuation as being passive aggressive. They're called "morons."

Edit: in the name of further research I asked my wife, who is a non-punctuation texter, what she thought about this. Here's what I got.

I'm glad that full stops are now passive aggressive, because that's been my intent all along.

Anyone holding this view can get in the sea

Equally moronic as saying the letter "e" is passive aggressive

I think it is honestly really pathetic that so many of you claim to love language and yet what you really love is having a rigid form of interaction that you can shame people for not perfectly following or reacting intuitively to.

Language is ALWAYS a negotiation, if you dismiss people that interpret your sentences without a period as passive-aggressive, YOU are the one that loses because you have undermined the basic premise of communicating with others in favor of the comforting idea that there are a perfect set of unchanging abstract rules that can be applied to communication that delineate a "correct" way to do things.

There are no rules to language, language is not decided by a committee, language is a living breathing thing that does not give a fuck about your condescending attempt to lock it in stone and direct it towards being used as a tool to shame others with.

You don't get to decide what people react to and don't react to in your language.

If you insist on interpreting my use of punctuation in a text as anything other than an effort to communicate clearly, I'm likely to start being passive aggressive at some point.

This is a stupid rule and I will continue to ignore it.

Those rules are cringe, and you can safely tell them to suck your passive aggressive butthole.

So "full stop" means a Period, right? A period is a period, PERIOD. That's all it is. It ends a sentence, so you start a new one. It doesn't contain any emotional ammunition. It certainly isnt passive aggressive, that's just stupid.

What's next? Are we going to start debating the tyranny of the comma, or the righteous indignation of the semi-colon?

Or maybe we should be debating the infiltration of our written communications by Big Emoji? They're obviously behind all of this, trying to encourage more emoji use, to stuff their coffers with that sweet emoji revenue.

Calm the fuck down, people.

Perhaps related, but when communicating over the radio (including via digital printing modes like RTTY) you have to declare that you're done transmitting and yield the frequency to the other party. This is because your signal may fade, appearing to the other person like you stopped transmitting. This is the purpose of the ubiquitous "over" seen in movies and TV, though in ham circles you use the more casual "go ahead" or "back to you".

I imagine a period sends the same message, but because you don't have to manage turn-taking with texts the way you do on the radio the period can be seen as redundant because they already know you're done speaking. So sending a period may seem like you're emphasizing the finality of your message.

In radio, you signal the end of a contact (QSO) with "out", but again, in ham circles you just say "73".

Is any of this relevant? I have no idea I've been up since 1 AM this morning.

Suck. My. Dick.

Where I live Hahaha is kind of sarcastic and rude, ahahaha is like a cool and sincere lol.

Man, that must suck to be so incredibly insecure that you project your need for constant validation on to, quite literally, the most innocuous thing.

Uh, just in general, people tend to react horrifically to long messages, 'walls of text'.

... even on discussion boards, like here on lemmy, or as a first intro message to someone on some kind of dating app/site.

I've been using the internet since the mid 90s.

It did not used to be like this.

People thought of messages as letters, like emails.

Now, a lot of people will get viscerally angry or disgusted in basically nearly any digital context if you send a message that's longer than roughly double the original Twitter character limit.

Hooray for normalizing slogans and soundbites in lieu of actual discourse, hooray for kicking off the trend of destroying our collective capacity to read multiple paragraphs at a time, great job Dorsey.

It's been this way for a long time. 20 years ago I was told I came off as angry in my texts. It took me a sec, but I figured out it's bc i put periods at the end of the last sentence.

That sounds like a good plan. See you there

-vs-

That sounds like a good plan. See you there.