What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
a) You made a gross generalization that cannot be attributed to a particular age group in a consistent, reproducible manner. “Old” in itself is of course an imprecise term use primarily in relative terms.
b) If as you assert, then you used the term incorrectly. The commonly accepted medical definition of “geriatric” is 65 years or older. When used in a general way to mean “aged” it is not “matter-of-fact” but a generalization and by it’s nature relative.
What you really mean is “people older than me that I find annoying” similar to “boomer” or, in your case, your specific non-factual and colloquial use of “geriatric”.
IOW, attributing your annoyance to some vague age group is roughly as ridiculous as attributing your annoyance to the color T-shirt someone is wearing. Or what country they come from, race they are… etc etc etc. It’s a pointless, meaningless, and often highly localized stereotype.
It’s not the attributes of the person, it’s the behavior.
@enbyecho @asklemmy Well, geriatric pregnancies start at age 35, so it’s really a flexible adjective. If you took it incorrectly, that’s on you.
Based on the mixed responses I’m getting, it is not an established stereotype that older people write emails and text messages poorly. If I knew it was then I wouldn’t have asked if others had similar experiences to mine in the first place.