Run out of characters in a tweet? Simply pick up where you left off with a new tweet reply (or five).
#CAT THUMBS UP MEME FREE#
With the vast digital expanse at our disposal, we’re free to use as many line breaks as we’d like in e-mails or fire off 20 texts in a group chat.
The internet gives our words room to breathe.
#CAT THUMBS UP MEME OFFLINE#
“It seems to be that using a dot-dot-dot imports an offline norm into an internet space,” McCulloch notes.
You wouldn’t want someone to read your brownies recipe only to discover you didn’t have space to include bake time or cooling instructions, right?īut we no longer have to worry about running out of room on the recipe card. To save real estate on the page, the writer would string together thoughts using ellipses and dashes, rather than penning longer, formal sentences with periods.
#CAT THUMBS UP MEME FULL#
If you’re sending someone a postcard, but you only have a small box to write in, you won’t speak in full sentences,” she points out. “When we think about informal pre-internet writing, space was at a premium. A look back at casual written communication of the past-old postcards, recipe books and informal notes-clued McCulloch into the intended use of the punctuation. Turns out, people were sprinkling their phrases with ellipses long before texts and Facebook comments existed. So what’s the deal with the ellipsis and why is it causing so much intergenerational confusion? We chatted with Gretchen McCulloch, Internet Linguist and author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, to learn more about the beloved Boomer punctuation and how the three dots are widening the age gap online. “I will spend 10 minutes trying to interpret the tone of this ellipsis,” TikToker captioned a montage of e-mails from their manager. “I emailed a professor to schedule a meeting to go over some classes and he replied with ‘Sounds good…we can meet then.’ I thought he hated me,” TikTok user lamented in a viral video last month. Users have poked fun at Baby Boomers and their penchant for decorative signs encouraging us to “Live, Laugh, Love.” They’ve also cast Millennial women as “cheugy” for sporting side parts and clapping along to the Friends theme song.Īnd now, the people of TikTok have taken aim at older adults for a particular grammatical choice: Their puzzling use - and overuse - of the ellipsis. But it’s not the first time the app has exposed these generational splits. The viral phone challenge stunned TikTok last year, with Millennial and Gen X parents watching in disbelief as their kids clutched pretend iPhones. You’re probably also wondering, “What the hell is charades?” If you’re a young teen or kid who grew up surrounded by smart devices (rather than flip phones or handsets), you might curl your hand like you’re holding a brick or simply stretch your palm out flat before beginning your mimed chat. What shape does your hand take? If you’re over the age of 15, you’ll probably extend your thumb and pinky fingers to create the surfer’s gesture and raise the symbol up to your ear. You draw a card that prompts you to act out a phone conversation.
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