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

Crossing paths

Did you ever wonder  whether you had crossed paths with someone years ago without knowing? 

This picture just re-surfaced from a bunch of slides my dad gave me about 20 years ago. It's just a snap he took of me (light blue anorak, looking at camera, aged 13) doing a sponsored walk in Birkenhead Park in 1977.

I remembered, when I saw it, chatting to the three bigger boys in the far left of the picture. They had tied their legs together to make it a four-legged walk and they were very jolly and witty. I remember deliberately keeping near them for the banter although I didn't know them.

Skipping ahead to 1998... when I got the slides off my dad and showed them to my new boyfriend it turned out the guy with the headband and Doctor Who scarf was him! 

I imagine it's quite rare to have documentary evidence that you have met significant others earlier in your life but wouldn't it be great to know about other occasions you have crossed paths with someone you didn't know at the time but later became a part of your life? My husband and I have both lived in this town for forty years and once worked in the same building at the same time, but we don't think we ever met. 

Does anyone else have examples of this? I'd love to hear them!

What on earth is the 'Sunk Costs Fallacy'?

Don't you just love it when something you didn't know had a name... has a name?

I've been reading an intriguing book called Think Like a Freak: Secrets of the Rogue Economist from those Superfreakonomics chaps and of the many interesting points I picked up, the one that pleased me most was finding out about the 'sunk cost fallacy'. Sunk costs are the amount of time, energy and resources you have invested in an enterprise. The danger, or the fallacy, is that because you have spent these costs you must continue even if you are flogging a dead horse* by doing so. You don't want to end up losing all that money and effort over nothing, do you? 

Good examples of this are ordering too much food and feeling you have to eat it to 'get your money's worth' or keeping things you don't want or need because they were expensive.

I, and a small circle of friends, have been referring to this as 'the queue at the Blue John Mines' after a 1990's bank holiday trip spent in a long line whilst disputing whether to stay because we'd already invested hours in the trip or abandon the whole idea and recoup what was left of the day. The trouble with 'the queue at the Blue John Mines' is that it means nothing to everyone else in the world. (They weren't even mines, it turns out, but a cavern, but we didn't wait to find out as it happens.)

The other things in the book that really struck me include: the importance of admitting you don't know, defining the problem properly before trying to solve it, and the importance of premortems - imagining your plans going wrong and asking what would have been most likely to cause it. Also - and this is where the sunk costs fallacy comes in - the importance of quitting before you waste more time and energy going down a wrong path. 

There's a much longer piece about the sunk cost fallacy on You're Not so Smart... we all do it all the time!

* No dead horses were hurt in the making of this blog