Is social media killing the Full Stop?

AJune 9, 2016 article in the New York Times (which is reproduced below) about the social media-induced death of the full stop (which Americans call a period) went viral in linguistic circles. Titled “Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style,” it was written by Dan Bileskywithout any full stop, as you will see below.

But is the full stop truly dying? Well, writing for the Huffington Post, Claire Fallon thinks the claims in the New York Times articles are a little overstated. Read excerpts of her take below-after the New York Times article. In the coming weeks, I will write a full article on the changing forms of grammar and punctuation in the age of the Internet.

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 staccato sentences favored by millennials - and increasingly their elders - a trend fueled by the freewheeling 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 - the punctuation equivalent of stagehands who dress in black to be less conspicuous - may have suddenly taken on meanings all its own

Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, whose books include “Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation,” the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, syntactic snark, 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 acquiescence or blithe acceptance

“The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts,” Professor Crystal said “In the 1990s the internet created an ethos of linguistic free love where breaking the rules was encouraged and punctuation was one of the ways this could be done”

Social media sites have only intensified that sense of liberation

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 with periods periods were 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’

Can ardent fans of punctuation take heart in any part of the period’s decline? Perhaps.

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 were increasingly eschewing emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they had been adopted by their parents and were therefore considered “uncool”

Now all we need to know is, what’s next to go? The question mark

No, the Full Stop Isn’t Going AnywhereClaire Fallon

One 2007 study found that of messages studied, just 39 percent of sentences in texts and 45 percent of sentences in IMs ended in periods.

Crystal, like other researchers, has noted an accompanying perception that full stops in IMs and text messages connote aggression, dissatisfaction, or hostility. “The period now has an emotional charge and has become an emoticon of sorts,” he told The Times. Another linguist, Geoffrey Nunberg, agreed. “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.”

All this, apparently, seems to add up to the point that the “point” is soon to be no more.

But it’s never made much sense for periods to be incorporated into text messages, which resemble formalized writing less than they resemble speech. Text messages and instant messages replaced, for most people, phone conversations - quick chats over where to meet up or long, latenight heart-to-hearts by the landline. These exchanges replaced meeting in person for a conversation. These interactions, formatted as responsive, chatty exchanges of short statements, mimic spoken conversations rather than written letters or articles. One linguist even found our diction in text messages shows verbal speech patterns rather than written ones.

This particular New York Times piece aside, there hasn’t been much evidence that a laissez-faire attitude toward the period is migrating from digital messaging to the broader category of the written word. Actually, this article is a great example of why: In longer, formalized pieces of writing, the natural breaks that might be signaled by pauses in speaking - or by the end of a text message - need to be clearly shown by other means.

The period has done a laudable job of that for centuries. Will we simply give up on it now? Having read an article without periods, and developed a corresponding eye twitch, I can confidently say: We. Will. Not.