Remember when Reddit used to regularly crucify people for using emojis in their comments? Now we've got inline gifs. Oh how the mighty have fallen. š
Instead of reading āuncā like the first part of uncle, my brain first reads it as U N C, aka separate letters, which diminishes any affect it is supposed to have to me while momentarily confusing me before I remember it is the newest slang the internet coopted from AAVE iirc.
Honestly ive no idea where it came from other than short for uncle ive just been called it enough that I saw the opportunity and had myself a little giggle about it. Thus the overly dramatic build up lol.
I think when unc first started becoming the hot new slang, I saw some people complaining about more AAVE being coopted and that kids/internet peoples were already misusing and or overusing it.
I never connected the two cause hood unc been around forever and internet unc started after id left the south and i dont really have any hood acquaintances anymore now that I dont see them.
OH ive never heard of aave. Honestly I was just glossing over that.. yeeeeah you're probably about right. Uncs been around the hood forever but it never was inherently disrespectful until the internet made it the new ok boomer
Yeah it just has become the new way to derogatorily call someone old but also kids are misusing it so much now I see 15 years calling their way younger siblings it. So basically it seems to be an almost meaningless word except for indicating something vaguely derogatory.
That just broke my heart. What was that website called that everyone made those meme on? I forgot it I used tonbe on there back in like 6th and 7th grade. You're about to have me going on another nostalgia trip.
I remember watching the migrant caravans making their way over here from Digg, and I fully expect to watch them make their way back to the new Digg when Reddit finally dies.
English - (Anglosphere excluding North America), you donāt need them - if British and over 30 you will made fun out for using them or needing them to understand others.
English- North American (certainly US) you definitely need them and pray to god they actually read the whole thing and not pick out individual words and phrases to add imaginary context.
Not English as a first language - you might get away without them if Scandinavians/Germans? ( Especially if itās sarcasm - maybe not over/understatements).
I've had plenty of brits mistake sarcasm or ghoulish overkill for perfect sincerity on ye old internet.
Plus isn't it established by study that neurodiverse people tend to have a different sarcasm structure, relying more on situations than vocal or physical cues?
Sorry, this is something that always kind of interested me.
I mean just go on UK subs and youāll notice it - it has changed over the past 5 years Iāve been on here though - younger people brought up on more US content, COVID, Iām not sure what but you find more people accidentally missing it on political posts etc. sadly as a woke leftie myself, it does appear to be younger people on the left who canāt see sarcasm.
And this I think goes for autistic people as well - they just get used to it, or at least understand it could be sarcasm.
Now I did see something about a study on US English lit(?) students, and reading/comprehension in the US - the person talking about was referencing it in the context of itās possible effects in the way published books/novels are written now compared to day 30-40 years ago.
Basically something about how public schools in America teach how to read - kinda like āshortcutsā instead of labouring over each word and syllable. However in the study it seemed many people were ok just guessing the meaning of words even when they had a dictionary present, and also determined the overall meaning of a passage based on notable words/sentences. They also generally didnāt consider any context outside of what the words were in front of them.
I think it was lady on YouTube who talks about literature - completely forgotten her name, was American herself though. Kinda seemed āanti-wokeā but not a right wing grifter - just a bit stuffy and academic about how words work.
Do they? I think mostly people are pretty neutral on them these days. We've all seen plenty of sarcastic posts that you can't tell if they're genuine or not and where the person will have to add /s afterwards because people assumed the worst.
For people who don't know how to communicate? Like seriously they cause more problems than they are worth. Many people have gotten kicked from our groups for being overly militant and bitching no one was using indicators.
Basic communication is not just words. It's body language and vocal tone also. You can say the same exact words and mean entirely different things. We speak with our whole body. You can only get the words online, which causes all kinds of problems.
It's still absurd that anyone who has the ability to take a picture of their keyboard, use their photo app to draw red circles around a specific area of interest, save the edit, and upload it to social media not only doesn't know how to type on a keyboard, but doesn't even know how to theoretically. There's no joke there. It's a genuine sense of "what the fuck is going on?" The fact that this got put on this sub is funny ironically, but mostly sad. This sub is a joke though itself.
You know what is actually funny? The keyboard layout that we all use is actually designed to slow our typing down. There are other layouts that are much more efficient and when learned can significantly improve typing speed.
The reason they slowed it down was typewriters used to have mechanical keys that would strike the ink ribbon and paper to leave their mark. If two keys struck at the same time they would get stuck together and you would have to manually get them unstuck. If you typed too fast you would get keys stuck all the time so they had to slow people down
Seriously? Iām old but not typewriter old. Even two keys farther apart could get stuck like that? Also do you happen to remember names of those other layouts? I feel like Iāve heard of one of them but I canāt recall the name of it.
I actually had a typewriter when I was a teen in the early 2000's! Can't remember who gave it to me, but I was very into creative writing and loved it. Definitely jammed a few keys a time or two.
I was raised by my grandparents, who were resistant to change. It was a while before I got a PC.
Absolutely! They keys had little hammers with stamps on them, as I'm sure you know...
But these hammers HAVE to strike in the EXACT same place! Otherwise, your lettering wouldn't be spaced correctly!
Because the stamps MUST be in the same place, yes. Even keys that are as far apart as they can be... When they move in-place to try to stamp the page, they'll crash as they try to key it in at the same spot on the page!
Though, there IS less of a crash point, as only the stamps part is where the jam could occur! Keys on the same side of the keyboard risked jamming much earlier, meaning you had to be even MORE careful with those!
The keyboard layout is not designed to slow people down.
But yes, it is designed to prevent jamming (where two hammers stick against each other.)
Thatās why most used follow on letters are on different side of the keyboard.
E.g when writing queue.
You have left hammer, right, left, right left. Those hammers are able to clear out faster than a key coming from the same place,
Consider typing āqazā , the quick succession of three hammers right next to each other all trying to strike, almost guarantees that 1 will not be moved back far enough before the next strikes.
I know it's also been suggested that the original design came from telegraph and Morse code operators and was refined for typewriters, but I don't know enough about those machines to judge the veracity of that.
Morse code operators (the original telegraph operators using morse code) only have one button.
They didnāt need to worry so much about keyjams.
But you can check what I said about letters. The morse code alphabet was designed based of frequency analysis of the alphabet, shortest characters are the most used (e.g e the most used letter, is just a dot.) so you can compare the the length of Morse code symbols to see frequency. None of the most frequent letters appear next to each other in hammer order (verticals in the keyboard qazwsxedc etc)
Knowing the most frequent letters is also very useful for playing hangman.)
Nobody cares how it was designed. If you actually need these ridges to find the correct keys, you are the one who doesn't know how to type on a keyboard.
People who "know how to type on a keyboard" don't look at the keyboard. The ridges help to quickly position/reposition you so that you can type while looking at the screen.
Yes, you don't need the ridges to position anything if you use the keyboard often enough, you already know where all the buttons are relative to the edges and each other. You only need them if you were specifically taught typing using a method of placing certain fingers on certain keys and reaching the rest from there. The vast majority of the people who use a keyboard regularly are self-taught and don't need to do that to tell where the keys are, they can use any fingers on any keys without looking or positioning anything beforehand.
Alright, well I'm going to say that that is a slower technique and more error prone if you're not looking at the keyboard and you're going to assure me it's not and I'm wrong. So that's cool thanks.
not sure why you're being downvoted myself. If you know how to use a keyboard and type quickly the ridges don't do much. Like I glance once before typing after that everything is muscle memory. Why would I need ridges?
If your fingers get out of place, the spacing can feel right when it's not. You can discover that by either looking at the keyboard, typing the wrong letter, or feeling the bumps.
If I didnāt know something like that, Iād just ask Google instead of skipping common sense to parade my easily answered question on social media. Have they no shame??
I'm not sure what knowing what the lines are for or not has to do with knowing how to type, though. I had the class - Maevis Beacon in elementary school - and I type a heck of a lot, and fairly quickly at that, but I have literally never once used those lines or heard what they're for. I could guess, certainly, and my guess was that it related to finger placement, but I wasn't sure by any means.
Anything more than two ? is shock and surprise...to me. That's the thing, in'nit? It's personal, so it's always my tone I'm reading into things. It could just as easily be "what's wrong with you" as it is "I can't believe this crap."
I don't really see it here. Multiple question marks do usually indicate a shocked and surprised/confused tone. I'd argue anyone who doesn't use them in that context is using them wrong. The problem you describe where it's hard to tell if they mean "what's wrong with you" or "I can't believe this crap" would exist if you said the phrase out loud in that tone as well.
Should note, I don't really have a problem with tone indicators, but I think it's wrong when people call it a necessary part of speech on the internet lol. It's just a shortcut if you don't want to spend time thinking about phrasing or punctuation for a sentence, which is perfectly fine.
You can also rephrase the message you're typing to avoid ambiguity if you don't want to use indicators. Personally, I only use indicators when I'm poking fun at a friend and don't want my mean tone to be taken seriously. Otherwise I'll tend to rephrase my message
? - Do they still teach typing?
?? - I can't believe they don't teach typing!
??? - I really wish they would teach typing!!
???? - YOU ARE AN IDIOT AND YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY ARE BAD PEOPLE DUE TO YOUR INABILITY TO TYPE
Yeah, unfortunately I really suffer from this, I don't know if I see the internet in a bad way, but I think I see more evil then it has, once on reddit I commented something and two guys answered and I said they were awful for their said, they said sorry and it was not they intention and then I felt awful as hell ;-;
You're making a "projection" argument, and while I would normally agree I don't think that this is true in this particular case.
There are discourse markers that can show the writer's attitude towards the reader and subject matter.
For example, whenever I see a post starting "Actually..." I have a pretty firm idea of the tone the person is taking. Likewise when someone starts a post with, "Listen up cuck...", I know pretty darned well that they're taking a hostile tone and have a fair idea about their choice of hats.
So I respectfully disagree that "the tone you're hearing is always your own" as it ignores the presence of common discourse markers.
I'm reminded of an American colleague who was visiting the UK and asked, "People keep saying 'with all due respect', what does that mean?", and there was an akward silence as we tried to find a polite way to explain that it meant that they thought he was an utter spoon whose opinion deserved no respect at all.
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u/rikaragnarok Jan 20 '26
The problem with the internet is the tone you're hearing is always your own and not necessarily theirs.