I’m drinking whisky right now!
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Yeah I think spell check and type ahead suggestions are causing the language to drift. People tend to assume that if a word is not flagged then it must be correct so we see a lot of there instead of their, and so-on.
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…flaunt instead of flout… 
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Damn it, I’m already texting with my thumbs instead of my pointer finger! What more do you want?
I have to keep ahead of all this, lest I lose even more credibility with my nieces.
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Just an aside, as a millennial, I have way too many peers and know too many genZ kids who will literally say “lol” out loud in response to something instead of laughing.
That disturbs me.
Listen my dude, if you actually think it’s funny, you’ll laugh. If you say “lol” at me, you might as well just deadpan say “that was funny” with a slack face. I don’t need pity lols. I can cope with whatever I said not landing.
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I’m not sure of that.
“Do or do not, there is no try” could be read as a variation upon “you can achieve anything if you put your mind to it”. Which is a rather quintessentially Boomerish statement.
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You’re right. More often, when I add the ellipsis it’s between two parts of the text, and so a little clearer, but I can see where there could be confusion. I like your second example with the square brackets.
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“Lead” instead of “led” as the past tense of “to lead”.
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Boomerspeak’s canonical features include
the dot dot dot
you mean the ellipsis, a totally cromulent punctuation? of course I use that
repeated commas,
wtf? i don’t even…
and the period at the end of a text message.
? how pointless…
random mid-sentence capitalization,
I thought that was just Trump…
typing in all caps,
that’s not Boomer, it’s Silent Generation
double-spacing after a period,
I kicked that habit back in '96, I think…
signing your name at the end of a text message,
LOL no
and confusion between the face with tears of joy emoji and the loudly crying emoji.
Guilty as charged…
sounds like I’m about 1/4 Boomer…OK.
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ah yeah i can see that. (i feel like most people i saw that meme were focusing on the “little shit” part of it.)
I will often use [snip] instead of ellipses when it’s a large section of text I’m clipping.
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What’s the deal with the random capitalization? Was there some earlier pedagogy (cursive?) that didn’t distinguish between capital and lowercase letters within a sentence?
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not in recent history. my guess is its just sloppy typing on mobile devices where shifting for caps is not as easy as on a typewriter… or its automatic and sometimes screws up. theres no reason to capitalize randomly. but not capitalizing accidentally is pretty easy to do online as my paragraphs are now proving… (yes i did just type three dots and i stand by my decision. LOL)
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Fuck right the hell off with that needless ageist BS; that’s not ‘boomer-speak,’ it’s just grammatically correct English.
It’s not my fault that the Dumbening has worked so well on so much of the populace, that they don’t even realize it.
Personally, I end my sentences with proper punctuation even on text messages, unless I’m in a rush. SFW.
I use the standard three-dot ellipses whenever I feel the need to let a written thought just trail off…
And at the same time, I also utilize contemporary abbreviations in my informal communications: “Obligs,” obvi, lol, FFS, WTF, etc.
Also 72 comments in, and no one has posted Word Crimes until now?
I am disappoint
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There’s an argument to be made against insisting on U+2026.
It’s not illicit, it certainly belongs to enough popular legacy encodings to have warranted a compatibility inclusion; but, unless there’s a need to draw a semantic distinction between “…” and “…” it feels awfully like cramming out-of-scope stylistic concerns into what (at least in the comforting theory) is supposed to be just the character encoding.
There certainly are contexts, like a lot of mathematical notation, where the is absolutely a semantic distinction and you can’t treat it as a style or formatting problem; but three consecutive periods that specifically aren’t an ellipsis doesn’t seem to be enough of a thing to make this one of them.
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No doubt somewhere someone is making fun of boomers for using hammers to drive nails (can’t you just use your iphone?), multimeters to test current (can’t you just stuck your fingers in the outlet?), or tardises to travel in space and time.
Grammar and punctuation are tools, and if they didn’t serve a purpose they would have gone the way of the electropoise. Copyeditors are, in my opinion, great heroes.
It was common with the German Idealists, such as Hegel. Schopenhauer used to make fun of it.
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“You have 15 minutes. You may turn your papers over now…”
the dot dot dot,
Yep, I use ellipses for pauses and missing fragments
repeated commas,
I am not sure what this is. I put in as many commas as the sentence seems to need. I don’t put them together.
and the period at the end of a text message
Always
which are joined by “random mid-sentence capitalization”,
I do use Random Mid-Sentence Capitalization to bracket a ‘thing’, perhaps as though it could be an acronym or a Trade Mark.
typing in all caps,
NEVER! (well, hardly ever)
double-spacing after a period,
Nope. Not guilty of that one.
signing your name at the end of a text message,
About half the time
and confusion between the face with tears of joy emoji and the loudly crying emoji.
I don’t really know what either of these are. I certainly have never used either of them.
“Stop writing please.”
OK, how did I do? Probably about 5/8 or 6/8 depending on who is marking. I am a boomer, but am I an okay one?
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On the one hand, grammatical style evolves just like the meaning of words, so I’d politely disagree that one style is correct. You know I agree with you about the Dumbening, and will agree that sometimes unorthodox grammar is representative of it when it’s the result of a lack of diligence rather than a consistent unorthodox way of speaking and writing. But irregardless† of that I absolutely agree that this is ridiculous ageist bullshit trying to sort people into artificial generations for a classic divide and conquer.
† 
(hangs head in geek shame)
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