I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned. I still put two spaces after a full stop.
But I digress. The question was about other unwritten rules of texting. Over the past year, it’s become frowned upon at my company (a multinational with around 130k employees) to use the default yellow emoticons. People are gently reminded to use the colour that most closely resembles their skin. This is for conversations over Teams and Slack.
On one hand, I can see how in some circles it could be some sort of racist dog whistle, but on the other hand when a lot of people are using other skin tones and it’s mostly white people using yellow, it feels almost like default = white, and using the white skin tone pushes back on that a little.
That’s where I learned to type, and the double-space is so ingrained in my muscle memory I can’t get rid of it. I also used to use lower case “L” for the number one, and upper case “O” for zero. I don’t do the former, but occasionally I catch myself doing the latter.
I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned. I still put two spaces after a full stop.
But I digress. The question was about other unwritten rules of texting. Over the past year, it’s become frowned upon at my company (a multinational with around 130k employees) to use the default yellow emoticons. People are gently reminded to use the colour that most closely resembles their skin. This is for conversations over Teams and Slack.
My mom uses the white smiley faces and I always feel like they are vaguely racist.
I have conflicted feelings about it.
On one hand, I can see how in some circles it could be some sort of racist dog whistle, but on the other hand when a lot of people are using other skin tones and it’s mostly white people using yellow, it feels almost like default = white, and using the white skin tone pushes back on that a little.
Two spaces as a convention is due to the monospaced fonts in typewriters.
If you aren’t using a monospaced font it’s typographically awkward.
That’s where I learned to type, and the double-space is so ingrained in my muscle memory I can’t get rid of it. I also used to use lower case “L” for the number one, and upper case “O” for zero. I don’t do the former, but occasionally I catch myself doing the latter.
I was taught double space after a period. I did it for almost 20 years until I forced myself to change.
😹