In this snowflake age, punctuation has the power to cause offence
It’s no mystery that language changes with culture and available tools. A hundred years ago, when there were five postal deliveries a day but no television, educated Britons spent a lot of time writing, and generally wrote easily, fluently and graciously. People also read a vast amount; general linguistic virtuosity was high. Now, we seem to mainly read celebrity tweets and Instagram posts, and communication is mediated by constant simultaneous instant messaging platforms, electronic spell checks and vast emoji menus. Hardly a shocker that our writing style has changed to match.
What’s interesting is how. Since we can press “send” and see instant delivery of our messages (we can also delete or hide and, in the case of Gmail, unsend some messages), we send missives of loose syntax, in incoherent little thoughts, flowing one after the other, with barely any time between the formulation of the thought and its execution. You can think, write and see your message hit
home in real time. So we don’t really know how to construct proper long sentences flowing into paragraphs any more. Certainly those in their 20s, if Tinder is anything to judge by, rarely send messages longer than two lines. Often, it’s just an emoji or two.
One curious result of all this is the changing meaning of the full stop – once a fully paid-up member of the communication community and now becoming punctuation non grata. Unless you’re Jacob Rees-Moss, that is. He entered the punctuation fray last weekend when, in the first week of his new role as Leader of the House of Commons, he issued a style guide to his staff that insisted all departmental communications feature a double space after full stops.
According to
linguist Gretchen McCulloch, the way messaging has changed online means that full stops are now seen as rudely abrupt.
“If you’re a young person and you’re sending a message to someone, the default way to break up your thoughts is to send each thought as a new message,” she explains. “Because the minimum thing necessary to send is the message itself, anything additional you include can take on an additional interpretation.”
A 2015 study by Binghamton University that surveyed 126 undergraduates pointed to this fascinating change: that texts that ended in a full stop were seen as being less sincere than the same message without a full stop.
But the import of full stops has changed since even then: now, according to McCulloch, the problem is with a clash of modes, when the message is positive but ends in a full stop. In person, full stops usually mean a dipping in the voice. Without that vital piece of context, they can seem strangely aggressive tacked on the end of an otherwise upbeat text.
Perhaps in the age of the snowflake, it’s no surprise that even the humble full stop has the power to cause offence.