In reply to MG:
Some time ago I found this in a Tumblr blog:
'Of all the skills that futurists predicted would become valuable in the era of constant communication, I don’t think anybody saw “conversational multithreading” coming.
No, I don’t mean holding multiple conversations with different people at the same time. I mean holding two or more completely separate conversations with the same person, via the same medium, at the same time.
Like when you’re texting, and the person on the other end asks you a question, then mentally eight-tracks and asks a different, unrelated question before you’ve finished keying in your response to the first one. So you answer the first question, and a conversation based on that answer ensues; then you answer the second question, and a totally different conversation based on that answer ensues, and now you’re having two separate conversations with the same person at the same time, and have to keep track of which responses pertain to which conversation purely from context.
Sometimes I wonder what the generational cutoff for that seeming unusual is - I didn’t pick up the skill until I was like thirty, so there’s always that undercurrent of generational novelty there.'
... load of self-congratulatory guff I thought. The skill is nothing new. My generation called it 'starting a new paragraph when writing a letter'.
Seems letter writing's become a bit of a lost art.