Stock Up Now: Periods in Short Supply
Though it might be reckless to recommend hoarding punctuation marks, keeping writers in the dark would be far more irresponsible. So please heed this warning. Back up your Word documents, assign a password to your dictionary, and, above all, lock down your Times Roman font: we're running out of periods.
If you haven't yet heard, here's the news:
Representatives of the popular Times Roman font recently announced a shortage of periods and have offered substitutes--such as inverted commas, exclamation marks, and semicolons--until the crisis is overcome by people such as yourself, who through creative management of surplus punctuation can perhaps allay the constant demand for periods, whose heavy usage in the last ten years (not only in English but in virtually every language in the world) is creating a burden on writers everywhere, thus generating a litany of comments, among them: "What the hell am I supposed to do without my periods? How am I going to write? Isn't this a terrible disaster? Are they crazy? Won't this just lead to misuse of other, less interesting punctuation???"Oh, sure, we've heard it all before. In fact, if you're a devoted reader of The New Yorker, you heard it ten years ago when comedian Steve Martin manufactured the crisis in his essay "Times Roman Font Announces Shortage of Periods" (reprinted in Martin's Pure Drivel, 1999).
Behind Steve's shenanigans lie a more serious point or two: about the shrinking length of sentences in an age of short attention spans and the fondness for exclamation marks on the part of the terminally chirpy. Martin writes, "A life of exclamation marks, no matter how superficially exciting, is no life at all!"
More from the serious side of Steve Martin can be found in his essay "The Death of My Father," in our Essay Sampler (Part 5). And a less satirical treatment of the period shows up in End Punctuation: Periods, Question Marks, and Exclamation Marks.
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