Point made

Periods are passive aggressive. I get this.

In the world of punctuation, there are your flashy exclamation points, inquisitive curly-cued question marks, and new-fangled interrobang that can’t decide if they are shouting or asking a question. On the other end of the scale you have your poor, overworked comma hanging out with colons as they create lists. Parentheses and dashes are there to set things aside — and to serve as easy places to cut when trimming a story for space. All punctuation has a purpose, even semicolons, whose primary use in writing is to show that the author is smarter than you and knows how to use a semicolon.

The mighty period has them all beat. A smidge of ink on a page or colored pixel on a screen brings things to an abrupt halt. Full stop. That’s it. The end.

The abrupt finality of a period speaks volumes. Take, for example, the difference between the two phrases “Oh, really?” and “Oh. Really.” You said those differently in your head didn’t you? The first is a message of interest, the second is something your spouse might say to you when you explain how stopping for one drink with your buddy requires you to get a ride home six hours later.

I was reminded of this fact a few weeks ago while exchanging instant messages with my wife and daughter. We were discussing plans for the rest of the day and what to do for dinner that night.

Beth was in the basement working on something and my wife and I were on opposite sides of our living room and rather than, you know, having someone open their mouths and actually speak, we were plunking away on the screens of our cellphones typing out messages to one another.

(As a parenthetical aside, it boggles my mind the sheer technological marvel that is the modern communication system. Messages made up of so many millions of bits and bytes are streamed wirelessly to a nearby cellular tower then relayed through a combination of fiber optic cable and copper wires or as radio waves to another tower to some server somewhere before bouncing back. All of this happens at close to light speed resulting in near instantaneous messages and only slightly longer for sending a picture, such as the one I sent to my wife of the rather gnarly looking toenail on my big toe asking her if she thought I should get it checked out.

Of course, I could have just gotten up and walked across my living room and put my foot up to her face to show her. However, given that I had been wearing a ratty pair of shoes and puttering around the yard all morning, I doubt she would have appreciated my feet near her face.)

(As a parenthetical to the parenthetical — sort of a literary fourth wall break within a fourth wall break — This is all beside the point, I was merely setting the stage so that you can better imagine the scene being played out. My wife and I about 10 feet apart and our daughter a floor below messaging each other about dinner plans.)

As someone who writes for a living, I have a habit of sending often very wordy texts and instant messages that also include punctuation.

My daughter grew up with texting being more common that talking on the phone with her friends, so will often revert to the shorthand abbreviations that sprung up when customers were being charged based on the volume of their texts. She seldom uses punctuation in these texts, a point that always mildly irked me, but which I set aside choosing to be a better person than those pedantic punctuation police with their punctilious persistence on prose perfection.

The conversation went downhill when I responded to a question with “OK.” rather than just “OK” without a period. This led ultimately to Beth coming upstairs to question why we were being so crabby and passive aggressive in using punctuation in our messages.

She didn’t get it. We weren’t. Nope. She didn’t buy it. I don’t know why. Oh well. I’ll stop now. I think it was about this point that Beth suggested throwing something heavy at me. Even I know when it is time to stop poking the bear, and have made a point to avoid superfluous punctation when messaging with my children.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.