No period as punctuation
Texting and Youtube commenting (two of the lowest forms of communication) have made waves in the English language, though mostly in the form of embarrassing news articles and ironically poorly written blog posts.
I've noticed that it's also seeped into my writing; specifically, I find myself omitting the period in some sentences.
It's a special case. It must be a sentence that makes up the entirety of a piece of communication (be it a comment, email, tweet, or whatever). Having a normally period-ed sentence followed by one with no period is obviously dumb, but I find that when all I have to say is one sentence, sometimes the period just makes it feel too... serious? Finite?
I don't know the word for it exactly, but I find that more and more I'm making a conscious choice not to end a one-sentence communication with no period.
Oh, but for the record, I'm pretty sure texters and Youtube commenters leave it out because they're functionally retarded.
I highly recommend that you check out Season 1, Episode 2 of the BBC show "It's Only a Theory" Where Professor of Linguistics David Crystal makes a persuasive case for his theory "Texting is good for the English language".
And, as the panel of judges consists of British comedians, much hilarity ensues.
We talked about it briefly in my linguistics classes, but I would definitely like to check out that show... any suggestions where to download it? My usual torrent locations are coming up dry.