What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
I’ve observed the same thing. The phenomenon is real, even if it’s a generalization. How would you communicate this idea in a polite way? “A certain way of communicating by text that is predominantly displayed by the geriatric population”?
You don’t. It’s still a pointless unprovable stereotype.
Is it really unprovable? A quick search online for me reveals a lot of spilled pixels on the subject of how age is correlated with communication styles in various media. I think Gretchen McCulloch wrote about this even.
I don’t see why it’s bad to talk about these things. I’ll admit, OP’s language here was rather inflammatory. But some people say what you’re saying regarding ebonics, yet AAVE has become one of the biggest fields in linguistics today. “Stereotype” doesn’t necessarily mean “problematic to acknowledge.”