You’ve probably heard the one about a man in a restaurant. He finishes his meal, whips out a gun and fires several rounds into the other diners, before strolling out. “What was that?” asks one of the fortunate diners who has not been shot. “Oh, we call him the Panda,” answers the barman. “He eats shoots and leaves!”

This joke depends upon the absence of punctuation to make its point, and Lynn Truss used “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” as the title of her book, subtitled “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”

But punctuation can be more than a joke, or a source of annoyance to pendants like me: it can cross over into manners.

Leah’s post on Friday about manners and their importance coincided with a discovery I made that day. Apparently, when texting someone, it is considered impolite to finish the text with a full stop/period, especially in a reply of just one word. The reason for this, as my 22-year-old daughter told me, is that it appears passive aggressive, or authoritarian and very final.

My immediate reaction was to scoff a little, so she explained politely that old people – anyone over the age of thirty-five – are considered exempt from this convention because they don’t know any better. Ouch!

After that conversation, I then checked with my younger daughter, who verified this but graciously gave me permission to use punctuation in texts to her. However, it made me think.

Most of us have been in the position where, in answer to the question “How are you?” or “How are things?” we get the one-word answer, “Fine.” We might even have given that answer ourselves in the past. That answer tells us that things are not fine, but effectively cuts off more communication, leaving us feeling helpless and maybe a little angry or frustrated. We can’t help or enquire further, if we are cut off at the pass by that one word “Fine.”

But it’s not the word itself, but the punctuation. It is that full stop.

We were all taught at school to start a sentence with a capital letter and to finish it with a full stop. Has that rule now changed?

What about the words, “Let me help.” As opposed to “Let me help” 

The one is a command but the other an open-ended suggestion. One-word sentences are even more telling. “Okay.” As opposed to “Okay”

Omitting the punctuation makes the words softer and more open-ended. If we omit the full stop at the end, we then get the answer, “Fine,” which allows further communication.

So, we have permission to use full stops at the end of texts if we are “oldies,” but perhaps we could think about the power of punctuation and whether it might be useful to break our old rules in favour of these new ones.

I wonder, in future years, if children at school will be taught to normally finish a sentence with a full stop, but not always at the end of a paragraph? Yet more rules in our already complicated English Language.

Mary

A Moodscope member