The ability of anybody with word processing equipment, smart phones, tablets, computers, laptops and anything else which types, to create grammar of their own concoction, grammar of their own conception, means that there are more full stops now in the world than at any one time. One of the reasons for this is the short attention span of people used to sound bites and social media updates, Twitter accounts, website addresses, snippets of news and information. Sentences are now shorter. Like this one. This means that there are more full stops than ever before, less semicolons and commas, less brackets, except when using text speech.
This never used to happen in the days of Marcel Proust.
The paragraph at the start of this passage contains five full stops. Of those five full stops, one of them means a lot to me and idolise it. Can you guess which one it is?
As an experiment I have screensaved this page and magnified the full stop to its fullest extent. In the normal run of things, it would have been completely missed, a psychological notification, almost subconscious as they eye scans over it, picks up the necessary information. The next stage of this project will be that I print off the full stop and post it somewhere in the town in which I live, (Paignton, Devon). How many people will then see it?
This might very well prove to be a very exciting line of inquiry.
Robert Garnham 