If you are a smartphone user of a certain age, you are probably one of two kinds of texters. My parents are the classic kind of baby boomer texters. They use punctuation and grammar as if an omnipotent teacher is always watching. My dad uses em-dashes without the help of Chat-GPT, which seems to favor that punctuation mark above all else. My parents proofread their texts way more than I ever have. While they drop the occasional «LOL» in the family group chat, they aren’t going wild with newfangled texting language. 

If you’re the adult child of the other kind of baby boomer texter, you probably get inexplicable messages regularly. Your mom is likely a Bitmoji warrior, and your dad uses GIFS like they’re a second language to him. These older people type with a grammatical clarity that would be expected from a 7-year-old. There are no rules to texting, but if there were any, these boomers would break them.