I left a message on Facebook for someone I care about that ended with the words, “one won”. I did it just because I thought was funny. That led to a whimsical discovery that I no longer had to place a period at the end of my sentences – in fact to do so would be rude and identify myself as an old person.
It seems that, for online use anyway, a period has become a loud shout -- a purposeful exclamation point useful only in drawing unnecessary attention, or as a way of making an angry burp of anti-social angst. Sentences no longer end, they gently back out a side door when no one is looking -- they’ve become bars without a jail, or that angry driver just ahead of you who hesitates before moving through an intersection just to make a point of how stupid you are.
Since a period is no longer an end to a thought, its new function has evidentially become nothing but a stuffy ritual of formality that writers can now use to mark up or down generalized feeling of huffiness, or perhaps a way to strike a vaguely passive-aggressive note of semi-displeasure. It’s like when you are pissed off at a person, but afraid they might hit you over the head with a stick of sensibility if you complain directly in their direction.
(As an aside --I think kids today are afraid that Canadians are going to come down south whenever the weather gets cold and bash their brains out with clubs, en masse, for both sport and their imagined fur.)
Toots magoo says I; Finest kind -- and since this new paradigm fits nicely into my generalized life goal of avoiding finality in any guise or pretense, it’s nice to see it becoming more mainstream. Or, it might just be kids today are lazy and don’t want to take the time to mark an end to a complete thought.
Without an ending a sentence is just a bunch of words in a row, much like life is without death.
Kids are kind of squishy with paragraphs too, now that I think of it.
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