Let’s put a full stop to all this nonsense
SENT any texts recently? Chances are you have, so if you messaged your partner to remember to buy some more milk and returned home to find her quivering with ill-suppressed fury, it’s not just because you are a chauvinist dinosaur who expects the apple of your eye to do more than her fair share of the domestic chores.
It’s because you used a full stop at the end of your message, you beast, and the wonder of it all is that your significant other didn’t actually get the police on your case in this clear instance of assault. Didn’t you know, you monster, you tyrant, you ogre, you Bluebeard, that full stops are threatening? You think I jest? Think again. Yup, the easily offended have now lighted on the innocent punctuation mark.
It’s the snowflakes, of course, and the row broke out on Twitter, naturally. “Older people,” declared one Rhiannon Cosslett, “do you realise that ending a sentence with a full stop comes across as sort of abrupt and unfriendly to younger people in an email/chat? Genuinely curious.”
Younger people, do you realise quite how asinine and stupid this makes you sound?
But no: Twitter erupted and the verdict seems to be that the full stop is really not something you would want to meet while out on your own in a dark alley. Don’t even think about the comma.
Academics have piled in, agreeing with the snowflakes, saying messages without full stops seemed more positive and enthusiastic and with them seemed insincere and more abrupt. Personally I have always found the full stop to be an almost foolproof indication that a sentence has ended, but what do I know? Similarly, a question mark, as employed just now, would imply a phrase used to elicit information. Or is this the equivalent these days of standing on a snowflake’s toe?
Come on, punctuation people. Let’s fight them in their own game. Let’s hurl commas at our millennial friends, and exclamation marks and semi-colons and the odd adverb and adjective until we have them cowering in the streets. Let subordinating conjunctions be our weapon of choice and, when they’re least expecting it, hit them with an adverbial clause. That’ll learn them to try to teach their grandmothers to suck eggs.
Except it won’t, of course, because these people are so illiterate they won’t have a clue what any of us are talking about. They’ll go on mangling the language, taking offence at absolutely anything including the correct usage of grammar and creating a world in which no one is actually going to need to be cancelled anymore because they have rendered language incomprehensible.Which leads to a thought.
In 1939 James Joyce launched an assault on the entire reading public, in the form of a book called Finnegans Wake. This was not so much a novel as an experiment, which involved highly individual use of language that the less charitable might characterise as “gobbledegook”.
Grammar and punctuation were what the more charitable might term “idiosyncratic”. The book weighs in at a mere 668 pages.
Force the snowflakes to read that; it would be a just and merited punishment. Failing that, just throw the book at them instead!