I went out with a guy based on his use of dashes once. Within moments of our first interaction — over text message — I was basically in love.
He didn’t just use the lazy singular dash (“-”) as a pause between his thoughts, or even the more time-consuming double-dash (“--”). Nope. This man used a proper em dash.That is, the kind that required him to hold down the dash button on his iPhone for that extra second, until the “—” appeared, then choose it from among three options. I don’t remember what his messages actually said. But he obviously really liked me.
I’m a writer; it’s natural I’d have a thing for grammar. But these days, it’s as if our punctuation is on steroids.
It’s not just that each of us is more delicately choosing our characters, knowing that an exclamation point or a colon carries more weight in our 140-character world. Or even that our punctuation suddenly feels like hyperbole (right?!?!?!?!?!) because we’ve lost all audible tone.
Those things are true. But it’s also as if a kind of micro-punctuation has emerged: tiny marks in the smallest of spaces that suddenly tell us more about the person on the other end than the words themselves (or, at least, we think they do).
Take the question mark. Recently, a friend I had dinner plans with sent a text to ask “what time” we were meeting. We’d been organizing this meal for weeks; a half-dozen emails back and forth. And yet the question — sans the mark — felt indifferent, almost cold. Couldn’t she at least bother to insert the necessary character?
Of course, had she inserted too many marks, that may have been a problem, too, as there is suddenly a very fine line between appearing overeager (too much punctuation) and dismissive (not enough).
Even the period, once the most benign of the punctuation spectrum, now feels aggressive. And the exclamation point is so ubiquitous that “when my girlfriends don’t use an exclamation point, I’m like ‘What’s wrong, you O.K.?’ ” said Jordana Narin, a 19-year-old student in New York.
“Girlfriends” may be a key word there, as women are more likely to use emotive punctuation than men are. Yet lately I’ve tried to rein my own effusiveness in, going as far as to insert additional punctuation into existing punctuation in an effort to soften the marks themselves.
So instead of responding to a text with “Cant wait!!” I’ll insert a space or two before the mark — “Cant wait !!” – for that extra little pause. Sometimes I’ll make the exclamation point a parenthetical, as a kind of after thought (“Can’t wait (!)”). A friend inserts an ellipses — “Can’t wait … !!” — so, as she puts it, “it’s less intense.”
“At this point, I’ve basically suspended judgment,” said Ben Crair, an editor at the New Republic who recently wrote a column about the new aggression of the period. “You could drive yourself insane trying to decode the hidden messages in other people’s punctuation.”
by Jessica Bennett, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ron Barrett
