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Comment by wildrhythms | Hacker News Reader

An article on this topic I like:

Are Your Texts Passive-Aggressive? The Answer May Lie In Your Punctuation

>"And we found consistently through many experiments that 'Yup' with a period resulted in responses that were more negative. So people thought 'Yup' with a period was less friendly, less sincere, and so on."

>"I actually really don't like getting text messages that end in periods because it always feels so harsh and passive-aggressive," said Juan Abenante Rincon, 24, a social media manager for Adidas. "Like, are you mad? What's going on? Like, did I do something wrong?"

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your...

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What level of neuroticism is this?

¨In other words, enough to send a chill down anyone's spine.¨

I say again, what level of neuroticism is this? If folks are reading that much into a standard element of grammar, then maybe the grammar isn't the problem.

¨Klin said the entire debate demonstrates that language is constantly changing — and that's OK.¨

Language exists to communicate ideas; if a change makes things harder to communicate, it's a bad change. Change isn't inherently good.

If hundreds of millions of people are using grammar one way (and have been for a long time), and some young adults come along and _misread_ that grammar, the worse course is to tell the 100s of millions to change their behavior.

I have to agree with the parent that on an intuitive level a single-sentence text message ending in a period conveys something pretty strongly. It does a couple things to me: indicating finality, turning an informal comment into a formalized sentence, and just feeling unnecessary thus prompting analysis. furthermore from a grammar perspective most messages are not proper sentences e.g. "yup" or "on my way". In the end we have to adapt our writing to the context, and texting has much more tonal analysis put on fewer symbols —

People ending their sentences in ellipses are the true passive aggressive ones...

Single period is normal, surely.

I HATE ellipses and I really don't even understand the purpose. What are they supposed to signify? I know two people that use them constantly and it makes me feel like I said something dumb; like there is some response that is so obvious that I shouldn't have needed to say what I said. I know that isn't their intention, but that's just what my brain makes of the those three trailing periods...

> Single period is normal, surely.

This I understand. Ending a text with a period does make it seem more "serious". I would interpret "yup." to have an almost annoyed tone, and I think that's pretty common. I think it just comes from not needing to punctuate statements given that most texts are single sentences anyway. The end of the text implies the period, adding it implies more.

Interesting point about the period. I hadn't thought about it before and now I'll never be able to unsee it.

To me ellipses really just are the passive aggressive marker

> We can do that...

We can do that, but it really shouldn't be necessary, or it's a really dumb thing to do, or I really just don't want to, or you should just do it yourself.

There's always something negative implied that the author doesn't want to say outright.

Then you have people who obviously don't use it like that, which makes it absolutely impossible to interpret their texts. At least if you are conditioned to interpreting it that way.

Sometimes I use ellipses when I start out writing one sentence, but then decide I want to say something else instead, interrupting what I was initially going to write with something that contradicts it. I suppose this is kind of silly, because, with writing, I can of course just, delete the initial sentence entirely...

... but, idk, it is often easier for me to write largely as if I am speaking? Where much of the punctuation plays the role of indicating inflection/intonation (I'm not sure what the difference is between those two), and pauses, etc., rather than what they are "supposed to" stand for. For example, the question mark at the end of the above sentence does not indicate that the sentence is a question, but that I want it to be read with the inflection that a question would have.

But maybe that is just laziness on my part. Of course, I know not to do this in formal communications. But, perhaps I should still refrain from being lazy in this way even when writing pseudonymous comments on the internet (and if writing it "properly" would make it not worth it to me to write the commend, than simply not write the comment).

The purpose of the ellipsis is to punctuate sentence fragments, which, given that the typical Internet user couldn't tell you what a sentence fragment was if their life depended on it, explains why they're so frequently misused.

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