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Professor David Crystal - Credit: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images
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LONDON — One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying
The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children,
whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being
felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the
digital age
So says David Crystal, who has written more than 100
books on language and is a former master of original pronunciation at
Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London — a man who understands the power of
tradition in language
The conspicuous omission of the period in text messages and
in instant messaging on social media, he says, is a product of the
punctuation-free sentences favored by millennials — and increasingly their
elders — a trend fueled by the style of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter
“We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full
stop,” Professor Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the
University of Wales, Bangor, said in an interview after he expounded on his
view recently at the Hay Festival in Wales
“In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has
come to an end, and none will have a full stop,” he added “So why use it?”
In fact, the understated period may have suddenly taken on
meanings all its own
Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, the period is
being deployed as a weapon to show irony, insincerity, even aggression
If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit,
six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to
include a period when you respond “Fine.” to show annoyance
“Fine” or “Fine!,” in contrast, could denote submission or acceptance
Professor Crystal’s observations on the fate of the period
are driven in part by frequent visits to high schools across Britain, where he
analyzes students’ text messages
Researchers at Binghamton University in New York and Rutgers
University in New Jersey have also recently noted the period’s new semantic
force
They asked 126 undergraduate students to review 16
exchanges, some in text messages, some in handwritten notes, that had one-word
affirmative responses (Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup) Some had periods, while others
did not
Those text message with periods were rated as less sincere,
the study found, whereas it made no difference in the notes penned by hand
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University
of California, Berkeley, noted that the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter
and the reading of messages on a cellphone or hand-held device has repurposed
the punctuation mark
“It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so
to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” he
said “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period’ It’s a mark It can be
aggressive It can be emphatic It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’
The shunning of the period, Professor Crystal said, has
paradoxically been accompanied by spasms of overpunctuation
“If someone texts, ‘Are you coming to the party?’ the
response,” he noted, was increasingly, “Yes, fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!”
But, of course, that exuberance would never be tolerated in
a classroom
At the same time, he said he found that British teenagers are
increasingly dodging emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out
loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they have been
adopted by their parents and are therefore considered “uncool”
Now all we need to know is, what’s next to go? The question
mark
