Ben Crair, "The Period Is Pissed: When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?", TNR 11/25/2013:
The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.” [...]
This is an unlikely heel turn in linguistics. In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive. “Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me by email. How and why did the period get so pissed off? [...]
“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’”
For me, the most interesting thing about this article is the comments section. And I don't mean the occasional displays of entertainingly clueless bile:
No. This is not even remotely true. At least, it shouldn't be. People should spelled properly, punctuate properly, use proper grammar, no matter the medium. Not to mention that people should say what they mean, and mean what they say.
A period does not indicate tone or emphasis. A period indicates the end of a sentence.
This below is the proper way to use punctuation, as well as the proper way to express oneself:
Ben Crair, you are an idiot.
Nor do I mean the occasional flashes of insight, or even the reference to an insightful discussion of the same phenomenon from 2009:
Love this article because it TOTALLY VINDICATES ME! My friends and family have thought I was crazy for years now, but I knew I was right! I wrote this back in 2009 after years of voicing my opinion ( about adding a period)! [rockonflash.wordpress.com] I mean the sheer number of comments. Compare this article to those that preceded and followed it in TNR's Culture section, in chronological order:
ARTICLE
NUMBER OF COMMENTS
A Heartbreaking Contemporary Account of America's Grief for Kennedy
0
Dear FCC, Please Don't Let Me Use My Phone on Airplanes
6
Yes, Japanese People Have Sex. But Do They Have Menopause?
1
Amazing Sculptures of Insects Made from Old Mechanical Parts
0
On Our Cover: Hate-Watching Washington
2
Viral video philosopher Jason Silva: "We're going to cure aging"
2
What Makes Us Human? Doing Pointless Things for Fun
2
What Happens When a Professor Tries To Use Philosophy to Prevent Suicide?
3
Do Readers Give Infographics a Free Pass?
0
Why Didn't an American Make '12 Years a Slave'?
14
Is Paolo Sorrentino Like Fellini? Even Better.
0
The Period is Pissed
125
How San Francisco's Latest Gold Rush Has Transformed the City
4
Meet the Man Who Wrote a 260-Page Biography on His BlackBerry
0
Hollywood's Animal-Cruelty Problem Must Look Familiar to the NFL and U.S. Military
0
The Most Blatant Ways Homeland Gets Washington Wrong
0
America's Least-Favorite City Has Become Television's Favorite Subject
0
What 'Scandal' Gets Right About Washington
0
My Holiday Plea: Stop Complaining About the Holidays
0
I've noted the popularity of peeving several times over the years, e.g. "The social psychology of lingusistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007; "Angry linguistic mobs with torches", 4/16/2008.
But maybe I should write "the popularity of linguistics", because only about two thirds of the comments are peeves or rebuttals of peeves — and the non-peeve-related comments still outnumber the next-largest number of comments by a factor of three or so.
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