Punctuation has always been controversial, but right now, amid fierce political debate, matters seem especially polarised
Punctuation is so 1990s. The comma is disappearing, the full stop has come to a full stop, and the semicolon has been repurposed as a pair of winking eyes. While the exclamation mark remains in rude health, the fate of the apostrophe seems especially bleak. Even the Apostrophe Protection Society has given up the fight, calling an end to its activities in 2019 and declaring a victory for “ignorance and laziness”. Debates over the correct use of punctuation have raged since English printers began to adopt the fancy new marks to supplement the simple virgule of medieval scribes (the ancestor of today’s forward slash), used singularly to serve a range of functions.
The recent release of a large electronic corpus of written English from the past 30 years by Lancaster University allows us to track this rapid shift to a plainer prose. Short messages typed in haste dispense with old-fashioned commas and stuffy semicolons in favour of more informal dashes. Text messages now often sent as individual sentences mean the full stop has become surplus to requirement; including one is seen to signal a deliberate desire to be blunt or convey hostility, similar to adding the word “period” in speech: “That’s enough – period.”
Simon Horobin is a professor in the Department of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford
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