Can You Spot the Old Fogey by Their Messaging?

My son has a theory. He says that you can tell how old a person is by looking at their text messages. He came up with this theory as I was showing him the comments many of you sent about my piece on the Sidekick iD.

He believes that when grownups make spelling mistakes in their messages it's because "their fat slow fingers" can't find the right key (especially when they're texting on their phones). When kids make spelling mistakes in their messages, it's on purpose as a form of screen-speech.

To prove his point, he showed me adult spelling mistakes where the mistake is usually a matter of a hitting a key that's in close proximity to the one you're trying for. Like missing a target. So an adult would be likely to type the word "for" as "fir" or "far," since on keyboards and cell phones those letters are usually next to each other.

Kids, on the hand, will very purposefully type "for" as "4." They know it's not the correct spelling (says my son), but "four" is too long to type. Part of the art is brevity, saving both time and wear and tear on the fingers.

If his theory is correct, then a kid might type "nd 2 talk asap" and an adult would type something more along the lines of "nerd ty talK is siin as passable."

A few other telltale signs for a young person's message? They tend to be vowel deprived. To keep the messages short, they often remove the vowels. "PHNE" and "VCTION" are nearly as easy to read as their more voweled counterparts. Vowels in text messaging may go the way of vowels in a Scrabble game (not as useful as consonants).

The only time kids use lots of vowels is for emphasis in words like "COOOOOL" or "AAAARRGH" or "UUUGH." Grownups, my son says, forget about the shift key, so their messages are either all in uppercase or lowercase—not mixed.

Grownups will also leave out punctuation since they can never find it on their cell phones. Spaces between words, apostrophes, and parentheses are a challenge because they often involve some sort of combination of keys. After a certain age, you'll find it impossible to type something like "$%^*@."

Thirty billion email messages and five billion text messages are exchanged every day. People are reading and writing more than ever—just in shorter bursts. And more adults are text messaging than ever before. But the message gives away a lot of detail about the messenger—especially their age. Send your comments to this post and I'll try to guess your age!

P.S.: My favorite generation gap messaging story is from NPR. Invented by Howard Stapleton to keep kids from loitering, a ringtone that sounds like a mosquito to repel children. He said that adults can't hear the high frequency sound, but it drives kids away.