And the clock ticks uncomfortably on, dot…by dot…by dot…Īsterisks are meant to be noticed. This brings awkwardness into the equation, and the ellipsis (or even the written words "dot dot dot") is another way to say "well this is awkward." The conversation is not over, but someone has to make a move.
![asterix punctuation asterix punctuation](http://s4587.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Google_Search_Masters-by-by-renatotarga-via-creative-commons_BW_invert.jpg)
"Pizza…" Is that an invitation? An opinion? It sits there waiting for a response. It asks the receiver of the message to fill in the text, and in that way is very coy and potentially flirty. The ellipsis, a row of three dots, stands for an omitted section of text. It adds not a shout, but a genuine smile.
![asterix punctuation asterix punctuation](https://content.presentermedia.com/content/animsp/00023000/23432/chrome_asterisk_symbol_spin_300_wht.gif)
This comes off dry, cold, and little sarcastic: "I am looking forward to the meeting." But with the exclamation point - "I am looking forward to the meeting!" - it is warm and sincere. In an email, where it might seem a little too informal to just leave off end punctuation, the exclamation point serves as a solution to the problem of the angry period. In digital communication it has become a sincerity marker. The exclamation point has long been seen as a marker of loudness or excitement, but its emotional range is more complex than that. In an analysis of a corpus of nine million social media interactions, they found that the appearance of a period is highly correlated with a particular phrase beginning with f and ending with you. A study by Idibon adds support to the idea of the negative period. In that context, a period starts to look a little abrupt and aggressive. As Ben Crair noted at The New Republic, when it comes to online chatting and texting, the period has come to mean "I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded." Since digital communication is more like an ongoing conversation, people usually leave off final punctuation and just hit send. But lately, the period has become a bit more than that. What could be simpler than period? One little dot that ends a sentence, a few pixels. Let's take a look at the secret emotional lives of five punctuation marks. Punctuation marks accept their utilitarian roles, but they too carry feelings, and they express them in subtle ways that are sometimes easy to miss. It works quietly in the background, sweeping up and trying to keep the information flow tidy, while words prance around spilling thought, meaning, and feeling all over the place. Punctuation is the homely, workaday cousin to the glamorous word.