🤔 Ending a text message in a period is passive aggressive ( ? )

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BartholomewB said:
On another website, just a few days ago, I saw a joky comment about this foolishness. But I still haven’t fully understood what “passive-aggression” is supposed to mean. Is it simply the same as “disapproval” or is it something different?
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A husband tells his wife, “I’m going to go out drinking with the guys again tonight.”

The wife says, “Whatever you want, honey.”

Verbal intonation could give different meanings to the wife’s response. Approval, defeated, frustration, warning…

Apparently, if this article is to be believed, the use of a period is used as a signifier for connotation. I assume they don’t mean any use of a period, and not in writing in general, but specifically short texts.
 
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Yes, it seems to be something like scare quotes. Nobody ever claimed that all quotes are scare quotes, just that they can sometimes be used that way.
 
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ThinkingSapien said:
That, and people didnt know that hitting the space button twice also generates a period.
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I actually did not know that about the space button. And my phone is the kind were the punctuation and special characters are on a separate screen from the letters and numbers.

Thank you very much for that useful tip.
 
PaulinVA said:
Apparently one space is now enough
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@PaulinVA, you aroused my curiosity. When did book publishers switch from double to single spacing after a period? I was just looking at some older books on my shelves, and the change was evidently something that happened quite slowly. I have a book published by the Viking Press in 1946 that already used single spacing, while a couple of volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, both published in 1965, still used double spacing. How long double spacing remained in use after that, I don’t know.
 
And the number of minutes of my life spent thinking about this, minutes I will never get back, are ticking away…

I am “old school”, and when I take pen to paper (or its digital equivalent), I use traditional grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation. When I send text messages, they are the same as if I were writing a short letter or memo. I have too much respect for the language, and its proper rendering, to butcher it.
 
HomeschoolDad said:
I am “old school”, and when I take pen to paper (or its digital equivalent), I use traditional grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation.
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When I take literal pen to paper, I sometimes write in cursive. It’s an archaic writing system that the younger generation does not know. If they try hard enough, they may be able read some of it.
 
ThinkingSapien said:
I sometimes write in cursive.
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I always write in cursive. There are things I don’t want to lose or forget that I write in notebooks. If you only have it in your computer, when your computer dies, it’s gone. If you keep computer printouts, they take up too much space and it’s too time-consuming to keep them filed in any kind of order. Written in a notebook, they’re safe and sound.
 
ThinkingSapien said:
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HomeschoolDad:
I am “old school”, and when I take pen to paper (or its digital equivalent), I use traditional grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation.
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When I take literal pen to paper, I sometimes write in cursive. It’s an archaic writing system that the younger generation does not know. If they try hard enough, they may be able read some of it.
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So do I. I only write things such as grocery lists, task lists, and my son’s daily lesson pages (I created a blank page template with subject headings and space to write, assign grades, and make notes).
 
I put this in the same category as capitalizing Black and keeping white in lower case. These new rules are arbitrarily made up and intended to gaslight everyone.
 
Nor do most of them understand the joy of receiving a handwritten letter. I have probably every letter my husband ever wrote to me in his tiny unique rounded scrawl. And he has my tiny backhanded, unique-to-me cursive letters as well.

How do you sit down with an email or a text and reread it and see and feel the same thing as a handwritten letter that someone took the time to put pen to paper?

You don’t.
 
This is all in somebody’s head. I know plenty of people who text ending with a period. I know people who write e-mails full of emojis. I know people who don’t use punctuation at all. Seriously, NO ONE cares unless they’re some sort of grammar policeman.

It’s kind of understood that if you type in all caps or don’t seem to write coherently then you might be very old, mentally challenged, or brand new to texting/ internet…that’s about as far as it goes.
 
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Irishmom2 said:
How do you sit down with an email or a text and reread it and see and feel the same thing as a handwritten letter that someone took the time to put pen to paper?
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I do. My husband never wrote me a letter, he wasn’t the type. Plus, we were living 5 or less minutes apart during our entire single lives together. If we were apart for travel, etc we would usually just telephone. The man I was seeing for years before him did not write or spell well, he had some kind of possible learning disability when it came to writing (but he was very good at other things).

The people who wrote me the long, soulful letters did not end up being very good for me at all. One was in prison.

If one happens to meet a person who enjoys writing long, nice letters by hand, fine, that’s something to enjoy together, but it’s not somehow inherently better than a guy sending a very nice text or e-mail or whatever.
 
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Well, I didn’t just mean romantic relationships. I treasure letters from my parents, friends, it doesn’t matter who. I understand that there will always be people for whom certain things are not important. But for many people “of a certain age” it is a preference.
 
Yes, I still treasure some handwritten letters from college when I corresponded long distance with my mom and dad, especially the year I studied abroad. They were lifelines to “back home” and kept me connected to my family in the USA.
 
It is two spaces at the end of a sentence. This is indisputable. Why? Because 49 years ago Mrs. McGowan, our freshman typing teacher, said so.
 
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