angry.png

Do you sense any hostility in this text exchange shown in the pic? Turns out that ending a text with a period is the new passive-aggressive way of telling someone off, just like how people sometimes roll their eyes during a face-to-face conversation as a way of signaling their displeasure.

Ben Crair of The New Republic explains more on this period phenomenon:
In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive. "Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end," Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me by email. How and why did the period get so pissed off?
According to Crair, periods are considered optional via text message since it has different rules than prose speak. A good example is receiving a text that reads "Thanks." instead of "Thanks", which forces the recipient to wonder why did you added a dot at the end.

But why do some people get so worked up over a message, regardless of whether periods are involved. Maybe placing periods at the end of text messages just means that a texter practices proper grammar by going out of their way to capitalize and punctuate texts. Plus, nothing beats the power of a text that simply reads "k".