They want to do away with the full stop now…
Of course, this practice far predates the instant message. Poets have been using line breaks for basically forever. (In the right light, you might even say a text conversation has some of the same exuberant, associative, overlapping qualities of say, an e. e. cummings poem.) But we can credit the text and the IM for making the line break the default method of punctuation in the 21st century.
The period, meanwhile, has become the evil twin of the exclamation point. It’s now an optional mark that adds emphasis — but a nasty, dour sort of emphasis. “It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, told the New York Times.
Okay I accept that language changes after all we no longer use the language of Shakespeare or Austen to communicate however the full stop and the comma are useful indicators of breaks in the text if we fail to use them then the text becomes dense and unreadable
the idea that we should use line breaks to indicate the end of a sentence may well work in the case of short bursts of text as in instant messaging
however in longer pieces of written prose we use paragraphs to lump together ideas in a few related sentences
the idea that we should now just have a line break after every sentence makes the text as difficult to follow as a dense paragraph without any breathing spaces
I will continue to use English, complete with punctuation, in written prose, poetry and messaging. Period. I do so, because it is my responsibility to make my writing easily understood – and I have no desire to portray myself as an illiterate moron. Language changes, but the need for basic rules does not. Those rules exist for a purpose – much like the Highway Code does on the roads.
the idea of getting rid of full stops is not neW i first became aware of it about fifty years agO it is quite simple reallY all you need do is end every sentence with a capitaL then you start each new sentence with lower casE
simpleS
“I have no desire to portray myself as an illiterate moron”
Me also, too, as well. I also have no desire to join in the dumbing-down of society which seems endemic these days and is, I presume, part of the great plan.
And just try this technique on Facebook.
(OK. I know hold control and tap enter…)
Text to speech converters would be rightly confused too. They would just babble out one long sentence without a break. God help the hard of hearing.
I sometimes wonder how other languages manage with little or no punctuation. Thai, for instance (I’m only aware of this because it is my wife’s native language) appears not only to have almost no punctuation, but also lacks spaces between words much of the time, so a sentence can be just one long string of letters (of which there are 44 in the Thai alphabet).
eg.
???????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?.???? ?.???? ????????????????????????????????????? ?.???? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????? ???????? ????????????????????????????????????????? ???????? ???????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????? ?????????????? 300 ??? ???????????????????????? ?????????????????????????? 150 ??? ??????????? ??????????????? ???????????????????????????????????? ?????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????? 10 ?.?. 20 ????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
(the frenzied atmosphere that has accompanied the buying and selling of pink shirts bearing the kings symbol in amphur betong in yala province has not been surpassed in any other area.
thais from betong and thais from malaysia have travelled to obtain these shirts in order to show allegiance to the king.
mr. prapan siwayut , owner of a craft shop in the betong municipality said that during last week the sale of pink shirts , both long and short sleeved was greater than the sale of yellow shirts , and today , they only want pink. selling more than 300 shirts , both wholesale and retail , it has caused a shortage of some styles , normally the average sales are 150 a day.
according to mrs. wanee yokpisootpong , owner of the ready to wear clothes shop “adam” , pink shirts have been sold out since november 10th. they have had to order more so that they can meet the demand from the public who want to wear pink to show allegiance to the king.)
Needless to say, that’s just copied and pasted from somewhere – my spoken Thai is confined to the very basics (and that’s another nightmare, with it being a tonal language), and I can neither read nor write it. Nor am I ever likely to, no matter how much I study it. I don’t think I have enough years left!
I don’t think that there is too much to worry about. Most of us will just carry on writing properly. How often really do fads like this catch on and become permanently popular?
meihem in ce klasrum
Don’t let him ever….. stop
Think the appropriate and mature answer is to tell them to fuck off. [And that’s me, not DD]. Leave our language alone.