British linguist foresees demise of the full stop

The veteran British journalist Mark Tully was prescient not merely about politics but also punctuation when he wrote in 2000 that “they (the western world and the Indian elite) want to write a full stop in a land where are no full stops” in his seminal book of essays on India.

For, a British linguistics professor, David Crystal has now unwittingly anointed Tully as a prophet and India as a pioneer by attributing the imminent end of the period (paradoxically at the beginning of this millennium) to the ‘linguistic free love’ promoted by the internet and social media — both technological innovations eagerly and speedily adopted by Indians.

The intrinsic peripherality of a punctuation mark that seeks to stop the free flow of consciousness in limitless cyberspace is manifest. Ever since emoticons began to pepper sentences in social media communications, it was clear that the dot would go bust before long anyway.

However, Crystal’s bold assertion that the pinheaded punctuation mark itself is inevitably being co-opted as an emoticon — to add definitiveness to a pithy remark instead of merely concluding or over-punctuating it — is bound to cause ripples in conservative linguistic circles. Instead, there should be rejoicing, after all, the period is only being repurposed for something it is inherently suited to: making a point.