No, It's Not Aggressive: In Defense of the Period

It stands quietly, unused, lonely in a corner. The 13 other punctuation marks, meanwhile, are struggling to keep their emotions in check. The exclamation point is jumping out of the box full of excitement, so is the question mark with its unrequited pining. 

Let’s not even mention the colon and semicolon that want to expound for hours and bore the hell out of the message recipient. What about the bracket inside a pair of shapely parentheses that no one knows how to use? Or the awkward comma that cannot decide where to position itself, but is oh so crucial it spells the difference between eating your grandfather (“Let’s eat grandpa”) and eating with your grandfather (“Let’s eat, grandpa”).

This is the period, my favorite of all punctuation marks, which has been battered with accusations of being angry and aggressive in the past years. To me, the period is neither. It has no emotions, no feelings—just a beautiful, perfect sphere to end a sentence. Full stop.

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In fact, the period is your friend that says, “I’ve said what I wanted to say for now”—and that’s stating a fact, no emotion involved. The period is chill in this age of abusing punctuation like the deliberate triple exclamation points whose sarcasm is lost on almost everyone!!!

In the next few minutes the period might appear in your text exchange if it’s a two-sentence message. It will appear in the first but sadly not in the second—discarded like an old lover because it is deemed to convey feelings. But, really, that’s on the recipient. What progresses on the other side, the period has nothing to do with. It is just here, waiting in peace but ready to step in to end an argument, a declaration of love, a fight, an extra effort to a perfunctory “OK”—without the judgement of a question mark or an exclamation point. 

The period is, in fact, embarrassed by the show of emotions of its punctuation friends. It wants to throw itself into the bottomless pit of a long-winding sentence that uses all demonstrative punctuations except the “angry” period. It wants to bang through the glass doors of a house that’s struggling to contain its ellipsis bouncing all over the kitchen. It wants to pull down three exclamation points from escaping the box to end an “I love you!!!” and the question marks that are going to embarrass you in the morning when they end “Do you love me too???”   

Mortified, the period pretends to not know its friends that ingratiate themselves into sentences that should not even be written in the first place. “Seriously? Ellipsis was used twice today?” It prides itself as the cool cat, the indifferent one because it’s above the hot mess of punctuations. And yet, the only thing the period hates more is the absence of its friends. Because, really, what is subtext without the main text? How are we to read “I’m sorry I love you”? Or “I’m sorry this is always an issue with you”

Is the latter a question, an apology, an accusation? Let the period step in, let it glide ever so gracefully in what you thought would be a long reply because it took you 10 minutes to compose. The period sighs at what you’ve written but dutifully positions itself at the end of an out-of-character “Okey” (everyone knows you can’t trust a person that says “okey”).   

Let that one-word reply simmer. In the meantime, let’s look out the window to see children playing in the streets and hear the sound of lovers laughing as they walk along, no misunderstanding in the verbal conversation (except for the tone used—and that’s a whole new rabbit hole).   

It doesn’t matter if a sentence is factual or emotional, if it is filled with happiness or sadness, if it’s a tentative hello or a goodbye—the period grounds it as you try to make sense of it in the infernal pause between messages.

No, the period is not passive-aggressive; it’s just a full stop that lets you gather your thoughts (and hopefully keep you from sending more stupid messages). It is the perfect stop before the punchline that’ll make your friends laugh, it puts a halt to your confession. Without it, everything becomes as outrageous as the apostrophe that tries to possess words like Shop’s, TV’s or Tire’s. Contrary to dumb and depressingly widespread belief, these are only plurals. And the period, no matter how ridiculous a sentence is, puts a stop to it.