emoji that get brought up automatically by an auto-predict keyboard and seem readily interpretable as little pictures.* Internet slang like acronyms and emoticons is not just unfamiliar to them, it signals membership in a group that they have no desire to be a part of. To put it in the words of an older person who talked to me after using Facebook for a year or so, “I keep seeing people writing a colon and then a parenthesis. . . . What do they mean by that?” But even after I explained (“Oh, that’s rather clever!”), I have never once seen this person use a smiley.
This cohort may not have the same linguistic norms online as Internet People proper, but that doesn’t mean that they’re typing in newspaper-ready formal English any more than anyone else is online. By nature, these are the kind of internet residents that you can’t reach with a large internet survey, but the most common piece of linguistic anecdata that I kept seeing myself and hearing about from other Internet People concerns their use of separation characters. Many people in this group use hyphens or strings of periods or commas to separate one thought from the next (“i just had to beat 2 danish guys at ping poong.....& ..they were good....glad i havent lost my chops” or “thank you all for the birthday wishes - great to hear from so many old friends - hope you all are doing well -- had a lovely dinner” or “Happy Anniversary,,,Wishing you many more years of happiness together,,,,”).
We don’t have statistics about the exact prevalence, but the dash or ellipsis as generic separation character seems to be found throughout, at least, the English-speaking world. When I asked for more anecdotes on Twitter, someone commented, “So you’ve texted with my in-laws?” Why do all these people, who primarily went online to reach younger family members, still type more like each other than like their interlocutors? Our first clue comes from a senior that Jessamyn West videoed at one of her library drop-in tech sessions, sending his very first email. The man, Don, says to West behind the camera, “First time I ever typed a thing in my life.” Then he pauses and asks, “Something I use a lot of times, when I’m writing by longhand, is rather than normal punctuation, when I get to the end of a thought, I go ‘dot dot dot.’” He gestures to the computer: “Is that just period, period, period?” When West says it is, Don turns back to the keyboard and triumphantly types dot, dot, dot.
Don’s expression of triumph contrasted sharply with the bafflement that I heard from younger Internet People about separation characters, so I took the hint and went searching for more longhand. Where I ended up was postcards. One particularly fruitful source was a book of scanned postcards sent to Ringo Starr by the other three members of the Beatles. John Lennon and Paul McCartney tended to write longer messages with relatively standard punctuation, but George Harrison’s shorter messages read, in transcription, almost exactly like a text from a Pre Internet Person. A postcard sent to Starr from Harrison in 1978 has a whole five dots:
Lots of Love from Hawaii. . . . .
George+Olivia
Other postcards in the book have emoji-like sketches—a bear with a speech bubble, a smiley face below the signature. I found more postcards from Harrison on auction sites: one to his father has all the dashes you could ask for, as well as “xx” for kisses at the end, which is still common in British text messages:
Hi Dad - Eileen -
Hope you are O.K. and had a good drive back. We came to North Sweden for a week - Pretty Cold. But very nice - makes a change - Be back next week - speak to you then
Love George + Olivia xx
It’s not just a Beatles thing, or even just an English thing. A corpus study of over five hundred Swiss postcards from the 1950s to the 2010s notes two common features of the genre: repeated punctuation marks, like . . . . . . . ???, and !!!, as well as smiley faces, hearts, and other emoticon-like doodles. Indeed, this influence goes in both directions: a study comparing the postcards and text messages of Finnish teenagers in 2003 noted that they had begun writing sideways emoticon faces like :) in their postcards.
Other genres of informal writing also show dashes or ellipses as a generic separation character, especially