Me in history class: Wow, humanity has been through some fascinating times! I wonder if I’ll ever live through major historical events!
Me now: NO NO NO NO NO I WANT TO GET OFF THIS RIDE
it was supposed to be space travel. it was supposed to be space travel. it was supposed to be space travel. it was supposed to be space travel. it was supposed to be space tr
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great – where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
Anybody else got like,, rlly random connections to famous ppl?? Like my older brothers were friends w Jennifer Lawrence when they were like 12 and I just found out I’m friends w the cousin of the girl who voiced honey lemon in big hero six like, idk what I’m supposed to do with either of these tid bits I feel like I was supposed to live my life in ignorance of them
the tags on this are so funny because they range from “my neighbor went to school with tom cruise” to “my dad is best friends with macklemore”
Are you sure you know what you’re asking of me? Are you sure? Well, okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. This post is long and contains description of genital injury.
So as you’ll know, I worked three and a half long, hilarious years at an NHS sexual health and contraception clinic. I loved that job, and packed it in because the Tory cuts to the service meant running it became hideously untenably stressful, but that’s a story for another time.
One of my duties at the clinic was to take phone calls. Patients liked me on the phone because I have a nice voice and I’m basically completely unflappable, and they felt happy to tell me things. A vital skill in the wang biz.
One day, a man called. This was not unusual. “Hello,” he said. “I need to see one of your nurses about my, er, my chap.”
“Righty-oh sir,” I said, “are you experiencing any symptoms that you’re concerned about? It’s just a yes or no kind of question.”
“Well,” he said, and I instantly felt a dark and terrible energy pulsate down the phone. “Well… sort of. But, uh, it’s not symptoms of anything, it’s just…”
I would come to regret what I said next. “Is everything all right, sir?”
“Well.” There was a pause. I heard fidgeting. “I got a yeast infection.”
Phew, easy peasy. Yeasties are easy to fix. I sounded reassuring and buoyant. “Well that’s nothing to worry about, sir – if you don’t want to get anything over the counter from the chemist, we can-”
“No, no, that’s not the problem. Listen -” he sounded serious. “Listen, I’ll just tell you what’s the matter, and you’ll see what I mean.”
This is where, whenever I tell this story, I like to ask the listener to play a little game with me. The game is “Where Would You Tap Out?” I’d have already tapped out by going to the chemist and getting some Canestan.
“I didn’t want any chemicals on my chap, so I decided to go for a home remedy. Internet said garlic was good for yeast infections, and I’ve got a lot of garlic, so I figured that’d be all right.”
I made sympathetic noises. Home remedies for yeast infections are normal, and garlic is actually quite effective. “Oh good,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure how much to use, but I figured, I have a lot of garlic usually, so I minced a whole bulb.”
The dark energy wafting down the phone intensified.
“I packed it all over my, you know, knob, made a poultice. Packed it all over the head, like a hat. But, uh, I wasn’t sure how to keep it on..”
I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t want to scare him off by sounding judgemental.
“..so I just duct taped it all on. Wrapped duct tape all round it.”
Still with us? Tapped out yet?
“So er, that worked, kept it on nice and tight, and I left it on over night.”
Over night. All night with your cock mummified in garlic paste like some sort of fiendish chicken kiev.
“But, uh, when I took it off the next morning, well… garlic is…”
“Caustic,” I said, before I could stop myself. “Garlic is caustic.”
“Yeah! Yeah, it is!” he said, sounding cheerful that I, too, understood the Way of Garlic. “So I unwrapped my dick and, well, it looked kind of like… melted.”
I sat, silent, on the phone. Already I’d missed 6 other calls, watching them sail by on the other line while this saga unfolded.
“So I figured,” he continued, the terrible juggernaut barrelling unstoppably through this phallic disaster, “I should probably exfoliate it.”
“Exfoliate,” I echoed weakly.
“Yeah,” said this abject human disaster, misinterpreting my echolalic expression of horror as hearty encouragement. “So I had a look around the kitchen -” he was in the kitchen for all this “- for anything I could use and got my brillo pad-”
For anyone not in the UK, that’s what we call one of these:
I must have betrayed myself and given a gasp of horror at that point, because he quickly reassured me – “No, no, no, it’s okay – it was a new one!” before going on to describe scrubbing the affected area to remove the alkaline chemical burn that he’d inflicted on his poor, blameless cock.
“So you want to come in because of… this?” I said, assuming he would want a new dick by this point.
“Oh no, no -” he said, jovial again. “No, it’s all fine – it just, my knob’s gone all… well, it kind of looks camo print now. I was wondering if you could do anything about it looking camo print.”
No, sir. No, neither we nor anyone else can do anything about your camo print garlic cock mistake.
i'm very gay. i'd like a few dollars. 