Or, in English English, a full stop.
If your mate signed off their Whatsapp message to you with a full stop, how would you feel?
This is a real question? Why would I feel anything? A full stop denotes the end of a sentence. Nothing more. So what?
Would you worry you were in trouble, that you’d done something to offend them, and frantically start re-running your recent conversation with them in your mind?
No. It would simply mean that the person sending the message is capable for constructing and ending a sentence properly. So what?
You’d be forgiven for questioning it, as according to an internet linguist, the simple punctuation mark has taken on an almost ‘passive aggressive’ connotation when it comes to messaging.
Cockwaffle. It means nothing of the sort. It is a punctuation mark that denotes the end of a sentence. That’s it.
Gretchen McCulloch, from Montreal, Quebec, who has written a book about the rules of internet language, says many young people now see ending a text with a full stop as rude.
Then they are illiterate idiots and so is Gretchen McCulloch. This really is the most utter, utter bullshit. And she found enough of this bullshit to write a book. Good grief!
The world really is going to Hell in a hand-basket.
“going to Hell”
Going?
Gone, more like
This country used to be one of the most civilised in the world, now its a complete and utter mess.
The world has always had idiots in it, I suspect that it always will. I don’t think that it is too much to stress about. Quite an achievement to eke out an entire book from this kind of crap I would say.
Idiots used to be ridiculed, ignored or helped. Now they are almost worshipped.
Like Greta Thunberg.
This ‘fact’ was based on a survey of less than 200 undergraduates at one university in the USA taken in 2005 so it must be true.
I wonder how often people are suddenly asked in a survey to express an opinion on something they had never previously given a second thought to and come up with an ill-considered definitive answer just because they think they ought to have one. That’s especially true if the tone of a question suggests a preferred answer, but even just being asked gives the matter a weight it doesn’t deserve.
Person doing survey: If a friend signed off a text message with a full stop, how would you feel?
Stony: what? What the hell are you talking about?
PDS: Ending a message with a full stop can be seen as being rude or passive aggressive.
S: Or it could just be correct punctuation.
Quite.
A few years ago I taught IT in a pupil referral unit- a place for Young People Who Had Been Or Were At Risk Of Being Expelled From School.
I was told off for using the Arial font in my documents, and made to use Comic Sans instead.
Arial was ‘intimidating’ for the Young People, I was told.
I thought the same. A full stop is not aggressive. It just demotes the end of a sentence. Some people like this ‘linguist’ are just jumpers on to band waggons.