The New Yorker, June 9, 1997 P. 110

SHOUTS & MURMURS about a shortage of periods. [The writer uses only one period at the end of this casual.] Representatives of the popular Times Roman font recently announced a shortage of periods and have offered substitutes--such as inverted commas, exclamation marks, and semicolons--until the crisis is overcome by people such as yourself, who through creative management of surplus punctuation can perhaps allay the constant demand for periods, whose heavy usage in the last ten years (not only in English but in virtually every language in the world) is creating a burden on writers everywhere, thus generating a litany of comments, among them: "What the hell am I supposed to do without my periods? How am I going to write?" Isn't this a terrible disaster? Are they crazy? Won't this just lead to misuse of other, less interesting punctuation " ...The magazine International Hebrew has offered this emergency statement: "We currently have an oversupply of backwards periods and will be happy to send some to Mister Brainard or anyone else facing a crisis!" period backwards the in slip you while moment a for way other the look to sentence the getting is trick only The The general concern of writers is summed up by this brief telegram: Period shortage musn't continue stop Stop-stoppage must come to full stop stop We must resolve it and stop the stop- stoppage stop Yours truly, Tom Stoppard Needless to say, there has been an increasing pressure on the ellipsis... Writer quotes a spokesperson for the font, who says, "... An ellipsis point is too weak to stop a modern sentence, which would require at least two ellipsis points, leaving the third dot to stand alone pointlessly--and, indeed, two periods at the end of a sentence would look like a typo, comprende? And why is Times Roman so important? Why can't writers employ some of our other, lesser-used fonts, such as Goofy Deluxe, Namby Pamby Extra Narrow, or Gone Fishin'?"... Consider the New Punctuation and Suicide Cult in Southern Texas, whose credo is "Why not try some new and different kinds of punctuation and then kill ourselves?" ... Remembering the Albertus Extra Bold asterisk embargo of several years back, one hopes the crisis is solved quickly, because a life of exclamation marks, no matter how superficially exciting, is no life at all! ...The shortage itself may be a useful one, provided it's over quickly, for it has made at least this author appreciate and value his one spare period, and it is with great respect that I use it now.

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