tetraethyl lead

I saw an analysis of boomer online typing that found it’s highly similar to the style of prose people used on postcards, back when those were for actual mailing. So boomers type like they’re mailing someone a post card from the Grand Canyon.

Okay I type like that, RELAX...

Because many people write roughly how they talk, and a lot of old people talk kind of like this (though this is more structured than Trump usually manages when he speaks).

They’re just emulating literary greats like Jim Davis and Gary Larson

My best guess is that they grew up in an era where they didn't have access to italics since they were using typerwriters, so if you wanted to show emphasis you had to do it some other way. Underlining was possible, but it's also a pain in the ass to backspace to the beginning of the phrase and spam the underscore key compared to just putting quote marks before and after.

Honestly, it's making me wonder about the origin of using * for the same purpose in computing contexts. I've been doing it for decades, but I just picked it up from other people and never really thought about how arbitrary it is. Maybe it's as simple as being similar to quotations marks/apostrophes (in that it's a small superscript punctuation mark) but without an established meaning when used in pairs? The only other character on a standard US keyboard that fits that definition is ^, and asterisks look snazzier.

They say the same about us using shorthand and emojis. Typing "properly" is just silly generational warfare