Friday links! And dot-com the wolves edition

A federal contractor performs a routine stop to listen to your voicemails.

A federal contractor performs a routine stop to listen to your voicemails.

Let us say, just for a second, that someone invented technology that allowed everyone on Earth to communicate with one another almost instantaneously. People could use this marvelous machine to say anything they wanted, and they could say it to just one person or broadcast their ideas all over the world. You couldn’t use it to exert force or shoot lasers or anything; the machine could only convey speech and the written word, plus pictures. Approximately 20 years after this machine is invented, a government announces it has the right to record and read, at its leisure, everything everyone uses the machine to say. It must do so to protect freedom. Does this government sound democratic to you? Today is Friday, and the wolves have come out. Won’t you shiver in the vast field of prey with me?

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Does the period convey anger in text messages?

A hockey period, which is the third-angriest kind.

A hockey period, which is the third-angriest kind

Over at the New Republic, Ben Crair has written this consideration of why the period has become an angry punctuation mark. It’s a fun read, but I’m not sure I accept his premise. To wit:

The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”

First of all, the comma was always the humblest of punctuation marks. People don’t have long discussions about whether to omit the period in any given sentence and then agree that it doesn’t matter. More importantly, though, is this subtle change in broad, undocumented patterns of usage real?

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Micro-genre alert: Bad first date stories

First of all, the premise of the Mystery Date board game is awesome. Someone knocks on your door; you don’t know who it is, and you go on a date with them. How did they know where you live? It doesn’t matter—you’re just relieved that you did not draw the nerd card. As any semi-adolescent girl will tell you, drawing the nerd card is a catastrophic event. It is positively newsworthy, in fact. Proof: this Gawker piece series of screenshots about passive-aggressive text messages from a lawyer who showed up to the first date wearing a fedora. The fedora is key.* It establishes that the man whose text messages have now been viewed 77,000 times is an unsympathetic character, and we do not need to consider the implications of using the most sophisticated communications medium in human history to be catty about a bad date. It’s the same rhetorical device we see in this first date story and this one.

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