Go on, flip through the last hundred or so text messages between you and your contacts … notice anything special? If you're up with the times, you probably forgo using the once-important period in every exchange. Instead, you just hit send and carry on with your merry ways.

You're not alone in this. According to recent musings published by The New York Times, the period is no more. Out of style as fuck, as the kids say. In fact, it doesn't even really mean what it used to mean. Studies now suggest that periods evoke a certain type of aggression to recipients instead of simply signaling the end of a thought. Using a period, it seems, is just plain mean.

The reasons why, is because things like Instant Messaging and text messages now imitate real life conversations internally — times and places where we have physical social cues (like pauses or looking away) that indicate when we're done talking. And, as with poetry, line breaks via text messaging interfaces do just fine showing that we've said what we need to say.


"Text messaging is one of the most frequently used computer-mediated communication (CMC) methods," researchers in the study write. "The rapid pace of texting mimics face-to-face communication, leading to the question of whether the critical non-verbal aspects of conversation, such as tone, are expressed in CMC."

As for why it's now considered an "aggressive" action — who knows? The study claiming so only took 126 students to task, yet most of them all agree that sentences without a period seem more sincere (We should note, however, that this isn't the case with hand-written exchanges, just electronic). It's an even more passive aggressive way to signal the end and how you feel about it outside of the ever-offensive "K."

"Choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it," said Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania to the New Republic. "And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like, 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'"

So while we haven't gone full Latin (with earlier writings having no punctuation or spaces at all), we may be headed somewhere that sees little necessity for 'proper' ways of doing things in the future. If you get it, you get it.

Grammar Nazis are going to loose they're damn minds over this one