Period Drama
On the endless sentence of Generation Z.
What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.
At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence—that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.
That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller—every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.
Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards—forbidden notions to anyone under 45.
Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.
According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops—period.
In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice.”
Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”
To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.
Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged.”
This aversion to the full stop isn’t just a generational quirk. It’s a psychological tell. In a culture which worships progress and endless self-invention, finality is the ultimate taboo. The full stop commits. It declares a position. The full stop leaves nothing open to interpretation. It could not care less about your “vibes.” Commitment—to an opinion, to a partner, even to a sentence—is tantamount to violence in a culture whose default setting is constant motion.
The humble full stop, poor thing, is now the typographic equivalent of a strict parent. Its seemingly nonsensical restrictions go unappreciated by those who think they know best.
The full stop stakes a claim. You said something. You completed that thought. You have cordoned off that thought with a full stop. You mean it. You’ve exposed that thought to interpretation or even criticism. That, for many, is too much to bear. The horror. The horror! Much safer to drowse off with an ellipsis… or nothing at all.
Zoomers, raised in the long shadow of content warnings, forbidden speech, unsafe opinions, and cultural relativism, are led to believe that distinction is taboo. After all, why declare a position when all ideas, cultures, and preferences are just as valuable and worthy as the others?
To punctuate is to declare structure. And structure, in postmodern culture, is verboten. Structure suggests solidity. Structure suggests hierarchy. Structure lords over us with authority and rules and limitations—heresies our liquid modernity long ago declared iron-fisted.
In place of full stops, we get emotional comfort blankets: emojis, exclamations, ambiguous ellipsis. Even the humble sentence, that final redoubt of linguistic order, must surrender to the endless scroll like Sisyphus to the boulder.
In the end, the fear of the full stop is the fear of maturity. To submit to finality is to accept limitation. To end a sentence is to grow up. To know what you mean, to say it, and to stand by it, is to expose oneself to judgment. But perhaps that’s asking too much. After all, why grow up when you can just vibe—forever.
Period Drama
This might sound like the eternal gripe of the older generation decrying the decadence of the young. But I know it to be true.
Recently, I dated a Zoomer. She’d chatter about green flags and red flags and Palestinian flags and Pride flags. And I’d nod politely, like one would upon receiving six months to live. Her grammar was impeccable. Her sense of humour reassuringly dark. Her standard-issue dislikes of Israel, conservatives, and any idea, concept, belief, or entity which so rudely existed prior to her date of birth were endearing if not naïve.
I assumed her brain had absorbed these impeccably correct, received opinions unchallenged. Any garden-variety rebuttal met limp resistance. She’d needle me with her most transgressive (read: conventional) opinions.
“What do you think of polyamory?” she asked.
“An unmissable opportunity to disappoint two people,” I said.
I argued that polyamory had obvious appeal. That it doesn’t and cannot work. Silence.
“Hmmm. Perhaps monogamy is only a thing because of tradition,” she said, as if this were revealed truth.
“And why does tradition endure?” I asked. “Because it solves problems. Tradition solves problems so well,” I said, “that we forget the problem ever plagued us at all. Hence the fashionable clamour to erase ‘outdated’ traditions.”
Silence.
“What happens when the tradition fades away?” I asked.
A skirmish erupted in her skull. Her Received Opinions hurriedly wrapped piano wire around the neck of the intrusive thoughts. Too late.
“The… problem comes back…”
The Perils of the Full Stop
Anyway, it was not to be. Despite my best efforts in scrubbing from her brain the calcified deposits of French philosophers and their silly ramblings, our dreamy little tryst ended amicably and, ironically, like this sentence.
The autopsy report made for curious reading. I “always full-stopped,” her. Honestly, I had to Google that. Apparently, using a full stop now makes you a goose-stepping fascist, waffling on about seed oils and racial purity.
After reading that, I felt about 103 years old. I wish I was. A world in which the exclamation mark is considered sincere is a world with which I want no part. Full stop.
I think this is brilliant. I had a friend, a best friend 40 years ago now, and she would write Dear Vicky!!! and a couple of years ago, sent a Facebook message saying the same thing which wasn't much, "Dear Vicky!!! sorry for your loss." Well, my loss was my sister, and I would have liked more content. She came across as sincere, she thought. I unfriended her.
The keys to the asylum were turned over to the inmates in the late '60s. There being (probably) more of Us than there are of Them, one would think that they could be taken back. None will even try.