In the linked article at Wired, in the first paragraph, an example is given of
So I’m guessing that’s what the author [Gretchen McCulloch, whom Cory quoted in his post] means by “repeated commas”. Which looks to me like it’s an intention to make ellipses, but accidentally typing commas instead.
If it really is a common part of “Boomerspeak”, perhaps it could stem from not having one’s reading glasses on, and mistaking the comma key for the period key? Speaking for myself, without my glasses they look pretty much the same to me.
Does your dad have any trouble with his eyesight (or need glasses to read, but not always have them handy)? One of my siblings had a friend on facebook who was losing her eyesight and had asked all her friends to type their facebook posts in all-caps so that she would be able to read them. My sibling complied for a short time, to try to be inclusive of the friend, but gave it up because—as you can guess—it looked like they were always shouting, and their other friends who saw their posts didn’t understand why.
I write texts in fully-punctuated standard English, and was honestly surprised to read here that it’s not the norm to end texts with a period! Putting a sentence out there without a period at the end feels like walking out the door with your pants unbuttoned, or something.
That said, I’m even more surprised at the thin-skinned linguistic prescriptivists this article has drawn out of the woodwork. It’s not a personal attack on you when a pattern someone identifies as “boomer-speak” is something you also do. It’s not a personal attack on you when someone criticizes the culturally constructed dogma of “grammatically correct English” and you’re someone who uses standard English. Language does all sorts of stuff and people in different context use it in all sorts of ways that encode meaning in different, usually still quite sophisticated ways. That’s how language works.
OK, Gen-Xer.
Only if you learned to type on a typewriter.
I missed that. Or rather, I read those repeated commas as an ellipsis because lots of commas together didn’t make any sense. With that, I believe your interpretation.
I don’t, however, think I or any or my generation would have typed that, even though the comma and the period are next to each other. And the “love! You.” is like you are signing it, not me. Indeed, the whole quote seems designed to offend anyone of old-fashioned grammatical sensibilities.
Missing that clue, I Googled ‘repeated commas’ and got stuff about including or omitting commas around sub-clauses within a sentence; the second match find was this nice reference:
https://thewritepractice.com/polysyndeton/
This is fun, but it seems to be more about putting in conjuctions or copulas, and less about the actual commas.
This is strange: at least half the comments were dead on, but some of them, like the comma one, seem completely wild.
Anyway dot dot dot is S
E I S H 5
73 de Mike
I always thought that was more of a Black Twitter thing.
See also:
I think you’re right. And actually, the example of the commas is part of this sentence in the article:
There’s a Facebook group where people pretend to be boomers, which consists of typing things like [the example with the commas]
So, it’s not actually a quote of a Boomer. Make of that what we may, I guess?
Which would make it (possibly inadvertantly) ageist or ableist. Kind of like when Sarah Sanders made fun of Biden on stuttering.
That’s OK. The author of the piece is just a kid and probably just doesn’t know any better. /s
Some in the Silicon Valley area may remember the “three dot journalism” influential writing style of popular columnist Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle. (back when The Chron was a top news-paper)
Most good authors enjoy a variety of punctuation.
“why do boomers all have such a strange relationship with capitalization and punctuation”
Because in our day, we were expected to learn proper English. We actually learned how to read and write.
Four dots? 
Hey Genexers.
I’ll trade in my good olde Boomer three dots; but you gotta give me back the words: cool, vegan, and plastic.
Only three make up the ellipsis! One is the period between the two different sentences. 
In the Silicon Valley series finale last week, CEO Richard Hendricks sends a text with a four-dot ellipsis as a joke. The episode hinges on the fact that an AI alters the received message to three dots, leading the team to the inescapable conclusion that their about-to-be-released software will cause the collapse of civilization.
Play with punctuation at your peril.
So, Skynet is real… but starts out as a grammar pest?
It kind-of is, when it’s suggested that ‘boomer-speak’ is something to mock.
Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma Chameleon
You come and go, you come and go
This is your fault.
Among my (many) current bugbears
Beginning an answer with “So,…”
Using the word incredibly when it describes something that is not at all incredible.
