Angie texted one of our kids the other day, something like: “I want you to come home now.”
Innocuous enough, but for one thing. The period.
This text prompted an immediate phone call, the kid afraid that he’d done something to enrage his mother. “Kid,” I should say, is a relative term, and probably inappropriate. We’re talking about a 19-year-old. Our Brady Bunch outfit’s next generation ranges from 29 to 19.
Oh, and a grandbaby. She doesn’t text yet, although at 18 months she knows enough to hold a phone up to her ear and say, “Hi!” She also knows my phone from Angie’s, and she knows the possessive: “Bapa’s,” and “Mimi’s.” Pretty sure she’s a very stable genius. But that’s another column.
The period. That’s what this is about.
Evidently if you end a text sentence with a period, it somehow conveys a Biblical seriousness of purpose. It’s as if you raised your voice or whispered with deadly intensity. It prompts young adults to cower in fear, to immediately dial your number out of pure self-preservation, begging for forgiveness or mercy or at least leniency.
Pretty impressive, considering we probably couldn’t get their attention making dinner in the nude.
What’s particularly striking about this is that in similar contexts an exclamation point is entirely meaningless.
You notice this? Exclamation points show up everywhere, like mushrooms after a two-day rain. Salespeople sprinkle them liberally, as if they automatically bump the commission. But that virus has run rampant; they’re so ubiquitous that they are completely meaningless. Actually, they’re less than meaningless — they prompt me to immediately discount whatever it is that’s being said. They’ve become the de-escalation point.
The period has, in practice, taken its place. It’s like the ‘80s, when “bad” suddenly meant “good,” and adults couldn’t get their heads around it. I was a kid then, and it somehow made perfect sense. Words get all turned around – note the debate about “brat” at the moment. But punctuation?
Well, maybe it’s not entirely new, either. Lots of relatively intelligent young people end their spoken sentences with a lift in their pitch, seemingly turning assertions into questions. Used to bother me – what’s the matter, are you afraid to declare something so you need to pose a question instead? Now I guess I’m used to it? See what I did there?
Anyway, a period means an exclamation, and an exclamation point doesn’t mean squat.
