Wednesday 19 August 2020

Coming to a full stop?

To full stop or not to full stop? 

I'm riffing off one of Cultural Snow's (always excellent) blog posts here. In About punctuation marks and masks I learned that younger people consider a full stop at the end of a text message to be 'aggressive'. I just checked Wikipedia's entry on it and it's definitely 'a thing'. 

I am of a generation (and inclination) that still texts in full sentences with mostly correct spelling and appropriate punctuation. Admittedly I overuse the exclamation mark to the point where the full stop doesn't get much of a look in, and emojis feature heavily... which are safe enough, surely? 🍑🍆

But if, as you can see in my beautifully hand-crafted visualisation above, when you zoom in on a full stop it has a tiny little angry face, I’d better desist. Not that I text many young people. 

But what if there are other things I don't know? What if two question marks is a sexual invitation? What if brackets imply homophobia or an ellipses makes me a stalker... 

Help! I need to know these things.. please advise

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