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Ben Crair, interviewing Mark Liberman – professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania – on the evolving meaning of the full stop:

“In the world of texting and IMing … the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. [...]

I'm still clinging to the virtues of properly-punctuated text messages, but it's admittedly a dying (dare I say grotesque?) art. I wonder what sort of punctuation we'll use to communicate internet-connected machine statuses 10 years from now. Is it time to finally canonize a set of standard irony and sarcasm marks, but for machines only?

Mark Benson speaking photo

About Mark Benson

Mark Benson is Head of Samsung SmartThings, author of The Art of Software Thermal Management for Embedded Systems, and is a regular speaker and writer on leadership, organizational behavior, and the future of the smart home.

Read more about Mark in the preface