Watch Your .'s and !'s

(Image from cbc)

Your humble blogger is a language dinosaur. I've only recently become aware that ending text messages with a period (".") is a sign of insincerity or worse, though the young 'uns knew this in 2015. [bold added]

When that reply was followed by a period, subjects rated the response as less sincere than when no punctuation was used. The effect wasn't present in handwritten notes.

According to [psycholinguistics professor Celia M.] Klin and her fellow researchers, that's an indication that the text message period has taken on a life of its own. It is no longer just the correct way to end a sentence. It's an act of psychological warfare against your friends. In follow-up research that hasn't yet been published, they saw signs that exclamation points — once a rather uncouth punctuation mark — may make your messages seem more sincere than no punctuation at all.

It's bad enough that you can lose your job over using what you thought were the proper pronouns. But bad punctuation? Good thing I'm retired!!!!