One Space or Two?
At the risk of sounding like my mother, about thirty years or so ago, I learnt to type. Now, just to clarify, what I mean by ‘type’ is being able to use more than two fingers. There is no way you would get 100 words a minute out of me. Sometimes, I can look away whilst typing and sometimes I can’t. I also have a nasty habit of getting my ‘from’ and ‘form’ mixed up. It was a skill that I learnt. It might just become more useful in the future. How little we really knew. These days I spend most of my time tapping things out on a laptop/tablet/phone. The tech feels permanently stuck to my hip, and I use it far more than I actually pick up a pen.
I was also taught correct typing etiquette. For me, this was one space after a comma and always, ALWAYS, two spaces after a full stop. It’s what we did. I had it drilled into me. I still do it as a habit. That was until my automatic grammar and spellchecker decided to tell me that every gap at the end of my sentence was too big and an error.
Completely confused by this, I did what we all do. I frantically searched for what I was doing wrong on the world wide web. My search results caused me to gasp in complete horror. Two spaces after a full stop (or ‘period’ if you want to get all United States about it) is apparently ‘so before 1990’. Microsoft now deems it to be so out of date that they regard them as automatic mistakes. To quote one article, ‘double-spacers are a rapidly disappearing demographic’. There is a whole debate raging on about why we must keep the double space. One space is the future.
This news upset me. Such a profound revelation has completely passed me by. I feel just a little disappointed that I am now regarded as a ‘disappearing demographic’. I read on and discovered that there are so many changes that I had no idea of. Let’s look at messaging. For years I had texted, only to find out that WhatsApp was the way forward. Now there are so many ways of communicating that cannot count them. And then there is the language. I’m pretty sure that text speak came about because in the beginning phone companies used to charge for texts by the word.
This lead to the abbreviations that we now all love to hate. We mostly pretend to understand when we have no clue what they might mean. Lol. Fomo. B4. Cwot. I’m confused. Don’t even get me started on emojis though. Here was me thinking that thumbs up meant ‘ok’ or ‘yes, thanks’, only to read this week that new generations regard this as a ‘passive/aggressive insult’. So now I have no idea whether I am upsetting someone or not. I thought sending someone a picture of a peach was sending a pretty drawing of a piece of fruit, not bottom cheeks. Living like this, is it really a surprise that communication in this world is so poor and getting worse?
I think that we all like to believe that dealing with change is something we embrace. Inn reality though, it is difficult. At the moment, change is coming at us very quickly and from all directions. This has now been happening fairly relentlessly for the past two years or so. There is a constant influx of things I have to do differently. I’ve become jaded and tired by it. Every time I switch on the TV, the word ‘unprecedented’ is being used and bandied around. Frankly, it’s exhausted me. Boredom has never looked so attractive.
Part of this is because we have not been at all ready for the changes that have come about. Covid 19 came from nowhere. Out of the blue we were forced to face a life that we had never seen before. The changes that have been driven by this have left us with uncertainty not seen for many, many years. That uncertainty has left us with fear and insecurity. There is a feeling of not knowing what will happen next or how to cope with it.
In itself, acknowledging change is not easy. This is particularly because the changes that we have gone through and still face are and continue to be momentous. Expecting to merely accept them and skip on without any care is not therefore really reasonable. It’s all very well saying that we have to ‘move forward’ and ‘forge ahead’. What about if you just can’t do that? Humans (including me) are actually creatures of habit. We all have our little routines and structures. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to function properly. With the removal of the habits that we know so well comes unpredictability and risk. This isn’t easy for anyone to manage. Sometimes, it just is overwhelming.
I find that I am struggling with the changes I need to make in my life. I have no advice as to what to do or how to do it. I’m guessing that we are probably all very similar. I feel that the changes that we are going through need us to be a bit braver and more courageous than ever before. We also need to remember that humility and kindness needs to play a part. None of this is easy. What one person finds simple, another finds daunting. So, the next time you read my writing, before you jump to criticise, I want you to remember this. Two spaces was a thing once, even if it isn’t the same now. And maybe I’m just not as quick to cope and deal with change as you are.
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