Jane is a student at Trinity College Dublin, where she is in her second year, studying, of all things, English. Writing in the Irish Examiner recently she asked a few questions about the way we deal with the English language on social media.
“What’s the deal with all these full stops in texts? We’re just texting; why do you need to act like we’re negotiating a contract? What’s the need for all this formality? Quite frankly, the full stops feel a little aggressive. It’s just so blunt. Such a definite end to a text message. It makes me feel like I’m back in school again, and I’ve served my time.”
“Sure, when it comes from someone over the age of 30, I’ll take their full stop with a pinch of salt. I assume they just don’t know that those went out of fashion around the same time as MySpace and capris. But if one of my friends were to hit me with a ‘Hello.’ over text, I’d start sweating. Essentially, a text like that is grounds for me to assume that I am involved in a serious argument with said friend. That’s just not how we text.”
Well, as someone who recently qualified for free travel and sadly misses the Ford Capri, it’s safe to assume Jane and I see things differently. I learned not too long ago that the thumbs up emoji and the smiley face were gone out of fashion, and nobody told me. My friends still use these but then we’re old.
Another thing I discovered accidently is that if you send a thumbs-up emoji to an iPhone from a poor man’s regular smart phone, it translates to a question mark. I found this out when a friend was trying to arrange a meeting and suggested a time and place. He was confused when he kept receiving question marks from me, so he repeated the message a couple of times before he realised, I was still operating in the Dark Ages. Nobody was offended though.
Now things are getting even more complicated because Jane and her buddies want to eliminate punctuation from text messages completely. Punctuation is causing millennials and Gen Z people a lot of stress and it’s wasting valuable time for them on social media, so they want to sabotage it.
Jane says, “There’s a fairly strict rubric that all Gen Zer’s follow when they’re texting. Instead of using full stops, we tend to send multiple short messages. Each message is a bit like a sentence, but with poor structure. We’re not looking for a Nobel Prize in literature here. Clear, quick communication. Remove all full stops from phone keyboards. We can expand from there.”
Another columnist wrote, “Older people – do you realise that ending a sentence with a full stop comes across as sort of abrupt and unfriendly to younger people in an email/chat? Genuinely curious.”
Well, no I didn’t and if it comes across that way let me suggest you need to get over yourselves because I have no intention of corrupting the English language to suit your sensitive nature. Genuinely.
Emma Day, a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism in the UK took this antipathy towards the full stop a step further. She wrote that a full stop at the end of a sentence on WhatsApp, social media or text message is an unfriendly sign of aggression.
She stated that the Generation Z people who grew up with smartphones, the internet and social media, find the full stop intimidating when used in written messages.
These are the same people who can identify as a glow worm if it takes their fancy, throw paint at priceless art on a whim, glue their tongues to a motorway and cancel anyone who offends their sensibilities, which is very simply done by the way because they are easily offended.
They want to dismantle the English language because they feel threatened by an aggressive dot. “It’s upsetting” they say so let’s dump it. Constructing a sentence properly with the appropriate punctuation is too much trouble so their solution is to write badly instead.
The real reason behind this of course is pure laziness. It’s as easy to construct a sentence correctly as it is to butcher it but what do I know? I was born in the fifties.
I like to use the English language as it was intended and as I was taught and I’m not going to change. Punctuation has an important role to play and without it, understanding the written word would be more difficult. Bad grammar doesn’t help either but unfortunately, that’s becoming more common.
‘I seen’ and ‘I done’ are in everyday use now and seem to be considered acceptable. Unless the writer has a medical condition that precludes them from understanding the difference, then that’s laziness too and nothing less.
My mother didn’t have much formal education, but she was a big reader. She also had a love of the English language, and she encouraged me to read from a very young age. Thanks to her, I have been a book worm all my life and reading has given me endless pleasure.
She used to love spelling difficult words too and often challenged me. To this day when I write an article, I usually run it through spell check and if it detects an incorrectly spelled word, I am annoyed with myself. That is something Gen Z-ers and millennials won’t understand.
Punctuation exists for a reason that is seemingly lost on the younger generation. When one employer pointed out to a Gen Z-er that their email was grammatically incorrect, and asked if they had checked the spelling they replied, “Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?”
It’s not limiting, it’s just sad.
Spot on Trevor. By the way, I am older than you, so 😄👍.
Happy to hear that Richard………😃👍
Tell the Gen Zer’s to get a life!
If they don’t like it that’s their choice for those of us that practice what we were taught about the English language & punctuation & wish to practise it that is OUR CHOICE – if U don’t like what we are writing your bad so suck it up!
😂 You tell ’em Joan.
I can debate this one Trevor. Back in the day prior to SMS Texts and the smartphone era there was a brilliant international form of communication used widely by mariners and war time vis_a_vis World War 2. Invented in the early 1800s by Samuel Morse using a series of electrical pulses or sparks over radiotelegraphy. Punctuations were added mid to late 1800s and this was where the full stop was included. I used morse code (Radio telegraphy) whilst working as a qualified Marine Radio Officer in the Merchant Navy prior to joining AGS and although punctuations existed in the code, they were seldom if ever used by us on the world’s shipping routes. There was no need really as we would use a break in the sparks to signal an end to a sentence and then move to the next. We also used to leave it out on Telegraph sent via morse from ship to shore as the telegraph was a luxury piece of mail in shipping terms. Every letter or punctuation was charged so it generally was left out to save costs. Every country applied their own tariffs but rule of thumb was to drop punctuations in many of the telegraph traffic sent from ship.
Morse in my time was the modern sms txt via smartphone device as we would use lol, CUL, BFN etc etc in nearly all communications via morse ship to ship and ship to shore.
They were great days and morse was being sent at the rate of in my case, 56 words a minute by buck key. Times are a changing but really the shortcuts in the languages used now are just as they use to be back then unless we keep letter writing, posting etc.
It’s a pity just the same but we evolve and cope well given the
tools to play with.
Alas Morse no longer exists but I still lament those dots and dashes.
I’ll end on that note otherwise the narrative becomes a rant.
Never knew you were in the merchant navy Frank. A good point, well made. Thanks for that.