Teenagers’ fear of the full stop is all a question of confidence
Aggressive punctuation is an actual thing. Last week, research from Birmingham University revealed that teenagers perceived text messages ending in a full stop as insincere. My daughter, who’s 13, agreed. “It makes you look angry,” she said. However, ellipses, the three dots that take the edge off every statement, are fine.
It strikes me that this reluctance on the part of teenagers to assert anything, as in saying something categoric enough to require a full stop, is symptomatic of an attitude of mind. It’s the equivalent of an earlier kind of diction, the terminally irritating Australian uplift at the end of a sentence which turns every statement into a question. Thus, saying anything assertively, like making a statement, is seen as being aggressively sure of yourself, whereas being tentative in your spoken or text speech is inviting agreement from your interlocutor.
Similarly, many teenagers won’t intrude on others’ space by calling them on the phone rather than texting, unless they really do require an immediate response. That’s a kind of etiquette in itself. And, funnily enough, it replicates the unease many felt nearly a century ago about the telephone intruding into people’s homes with its assertive ring … and, in a way, the concerns were right.
But there’s another aspect to all this, viz, the perennial desire of the young to send up adult attempts to ape their vernacular. So, teenagers joyously mock grown ups’ use of emojis; my daughters’ friends use them sparingly… the eyes streaming tears, as in tears of laughter, and eyes and mouth symbols for god knows what.
When teenagers do use copious emojis, beware. It may be what she calls “fairy comments”, by which she means using hearts, flowers, sparkles and fairy symbols to send up any statement they accompany as insincere and ironic – usually quotes on Instagram by white male politicians. Funnily enough, that’s exactly how these same symbols are used in the Asterix books … only they’re funnier. But that’s the usage right now. Give it another couple of weeks and the teenagers will probably have moved on. It’s annoying. Full stop.
Among the umpteen
things people didn’t vote Conservative for was to indoctrinate the young in outré sexual practices. The Government has imposed sex and relationships education on schools and has, moreover, paid various interest groups to provide material for it. The Proud Trust has used its £99,960 from the Government to offer a tool kit for teachers featuring two dice inscribed with body parts on each face. So you roll the dice and describe how the two parts shown might interact … they include “anus”, “vulva” and “hands and fingers”. You can see where this is going, and it’s not necessarily in the direction of consent, continence or decency. The problem about teenagers and sex isn’t a want of graphic information – they get that online. It’s a moral compass – and you don’t get that by rolling a dice.
Does the Catholic
Church really want bishops like the Rt Rev Sarah Mullaly, the consensual chief nurse turned bishop of London? Among the unexpected applicants for the vacant archbishopric of Lyons is Anne Soupa, 73, a biblical scholar. Alas, she has disqualified herself from the off, in my view, by wearing red lipstick. My advice to female would-be Catholic clerics is, unless you look like a nun or actually are a nun, forget it.