Pandemic Timing and Other Distractions

I started writing a blog post couple of days ago about how 2020 has turned into a blur despite my living in what is currently one of the safest places on earth where we haven't had any COVID cases in the community for months - while there have been a few people in quarantine during that time, all have come in from other hotspots. Life, apart from social distancing and hard borders enforcing quarantine for anyone coming into the state, has largely returned to normal. While we're still at Level 4 restrictions and some major events like the Perth Royal Show have been cancelled we can travel freely within most of the state, businesses have reopened and face masks are a rare sight unlike in many other parts of Australia.

This blurring of time seems to be affecting us all because I'm seeing comments about how our perception of time has gone nuts everywhere - on blogs, in discussions - online and in person, in newspaper articles and opinion pieces online. Since it's apparently a pandemic thing common to us all it made me realise that maybe I should think about something else other than how discombobulated I feel.

This is what I came up with. See that little black dot at the end of the previous sentence? It's the humble period or full stop depending on where you live and in the last few days from two quite unrelated sources I've learned that for younger folk - that would be teens and early twenties - the full stop - that extremely useful indicator of when a sentence ends - is regarded as weird or even suggests annoyance, irritation or anger when it appears in a text or email. Really. Apparently this is because these folk communicate largely electronically using short separate messages for each sentence so making punctuation redundant and other demarcation unnecessary. However much it offends my pedantic streak I can see a certain logic to this in text messages where the whole message forms a sentence but - and you knew there'd be a but, didn't you - not all text messages are only one sentence and emails in my experience rarely are. So what happens then?

The answer is things can get really messy especially with emails a major means of communication within the business community now that postal services are being cut back. Does this abhorrence of the full stop mean that this generation sees all business communications as angry? Is it going to move on to written letters - you know, those on paper - and not just those sent electronically? And what about books? Will we see the demise of commas and question marks? You only have to look at any of the bad punctuation jokes going around where an unpunctuated sentence suggests instead of sitting down for a meal with someone we're actually about to eat them to see that this could lead us into scary territory and the increased possibility of misunderstandings. (In my opinion one of the best of these bad punctuation jokes - there are whole websites devoted to them should you want to go down that rabbit hole - is the panda one which Lyn Truss featured on the back cover of her book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. If you've never heard it you can find it here.)

I know that things change with every generation seeking to distinguish itself from previous ones by subverting accepted norms or language. I'm thinking of how a few years ago "sick" had a new positive meaning assigned to it by my kids and their friends while "cool", well, that has pretty much moved on to be mainstream. This really doesn't bother me and I've been happy to adapt to the electronic world we live in but sometimes the need to break from the past is counter-productive. Punctuation is merely a way of breaking up words to make the meaning clearer. With the exception of the exclamation mark it says nothing about meaning or status and I'm not at all convinced that assigning any other meaning to them is an improvement. What comes next? Replacing punctuation with emojis?