Parents And Texting: 5 Weirdest Texting Habits Of Adults

The 5 Weirdest Texting Habits Of Adults
worried teenager with mobile phone
worried teenager with mobile phone

By Caroline Sudduth

Caroline is a junior at Hinsdale Central High School. She is a student reporter for The Mash, a weekly teen publication distributed to Chicagoland high schools.

Misusing abbreviations. My grandma just started texting about a month ago and she asked me to help her learn what all the abbreviations meant. Turns out she thought “LOL” meant “lots of love.” Can you imagine the confusing texts? Me: “Hi Grandma, I had a bad day today.” Grandma: “Oh, LOL.”

Overusing abbreviations. A lot of my friends’ parents attempt to be cool by loading their texts with random abbreviations. The problem is that they end up saying things like, “sup hun lemme kno wen 2 pick u up l8r. hmu, kk? ily ttyl.” Yeah, really cool.

Using too many emoticons. I’m all for the occasional “:)” but when adults try to write their texts almost completely in emoticons, it just gets awkward. Instead of hunting down a train emoticon on the Emoji Free app when I ask where you are, how about you just type “on the train.” Sounds a lot easier to me.

Writing long texts. Most adults have already figured out email, but some still struggle with texting. This leads to texts that look more like emails, and they can take up to five minutes to read! For example, I get countless novel-length texts from my mom. Even when her phone cuts off her texts, she just splits the novel into three or four shorter ones.

Signing texts. When my mom first started texting, she didn’t really understand the concept. The weirdest thing she did was sign all her texts to me with, “xoxo, Mom.” I don’t think she quite understood the concept of a contacts list, especially since she was still using a paper address book.

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