We’ve all been there: staring at an email sent by a work colleague that is rife with tension. We agonize over every short sentence, turn of phrase, and use of punctuation. Are they angry? Frustrated? Why is that word in all caps? Trying to understand someone’s hidden subtext in an email is maddening.

Text messages seem to bring that issue to the doorstep of friendships and marriages. My own husband worries if he writes, “I love you!” in a text and I reply, “Love you, too.” God forbid I omit an exclamation point. If I do, I’m clearly trying to tell him that I’m mad at him and love him a little less than normal.

Instant messenger (oh AIM, remember those days?) and texting have already made capitalization optional. If you’re friends with me, you get annoyingly grammatically correct texts–come on, guys, look at where I work–that are proofread. Seriously. But I’m old-fashioned and a stickler for making sure people understand exactly what I’m saying. I take my punctuation and capitalization seriously.

The New York Times article “Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style” suggests that the period is becoming irrelevant and is more frequently a type of emoticon used “to show irony, syntactic snark, insincerity, even aggression.” >:-o Just ask my husband!

The article goes on to point out that British teens are already giving up some emoticons and abbreviations like “LOL” and “ROTFL” because they’re used by their parents’ generation and thirty-somethings like me. I’m sure American teens are right there with them. My good friend texted me not long ago that her middle school students told her that only old people use emoticons. Ouch.

Check out The Times article above to ponder this some more. And also pay attention to how author Dan Bilefsky uses (or doesn’t) the period in the article.

So, what say you? Is capitalization irrelevant? Do we need periods anymore? Do you heart emoticons? What do you think is the next punctuation mark to go?