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THE VAMPIRE DIARIES ⇢ 1x01 | PILOT

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Bruno Munari - Images Of Reality

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?’

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

Keep in mind I’m a cis woman writing this.

So I was debating posting this but I think it needs to be said.

So I’m a student teacher and this week, we started at a new school district. Now I won’t presume to begin to pretend that I know what everyone’s political ideologies are in this school district but keep in mind that it’s in rural New York State and rural New York State tends to run red. Not as red as some other places but definitely not blue and not even really purple. 

Anyway yesterday was my first ever professional development day. So I’m all dressed up, introducing myself to other teachers, and I shake hands with the superintendent who seems like a really nice guy.

And about halfway through the day, he goes up to the front of the theater and he starts talking about the best ways to talk to and help transgender/nonbinary students. It’s the basic things we all learn in our education classes. And you can tell that he’s a bit uncomfortable and so are some of the teachers. And at last, he stops and says, “Folks, I have to be honest. My father is rolling in his grave right now.”

And I’m in the back like, “Oh no.”

And so he pauses again and then he starts implying that he was raised to have a very negative opinion on the transgender community. And he continues to say that he had to unlearn a lot in the past few decades and then he admitted that he still doesn’t get it. He outright admitted that he personally doesn’t understand how someone comes to the conclusion that they’re not their assigned gender. And he admits that of course he doesn’t because he’s never had to go through that.

Another pause.

And then he says, “But I don’t have to get it.”

The theater fills with whispers and then he says [and I’m paraphrasing here], “I don’t have to get it. I don’t even have to agree with it. Because it doesn’t matter what I think or what I feel or what my beliefs are. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that I respect that student and I respect their choice.”

And then he reminded the teachers of every single policy that the school district follows from letting any student use their bathroom of choice to changing the students’ names per the students’ requests to not telling the parents anything unless the student gives consent to do so.

And at the end, he brought it back by saying, “My father just rolled in his grave again. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what you believe, because it’s not about you. It’s about your kids. And you need to love your kids! Love your kids! Love your kids!”

Long story short, this looks like it’s going to be a good placement.

love your kids!! love your kids!!!

‘You don’t have to get it’ is the most important and (apparently) most difficult lesson to learn, alongside ‘this is not about you.’