We say, “The end. Full stop.”  It suggests finality, definition, mastery and control.

Full stops allow us to move neatly from one thing to the next, to package ideas in sentences and segment, select and ignore; they also shrink thought into soundbites, tweets and slogans that are quick, cheap and often disposable.

No other punctuation mark expresses death so directly, or stereotypically: as a blunt ending beyond which nothing can be added, with a bleak clarity and a silence.  It characterizes fear and taboo of death, and in modern times we incinerate corpses rather than go on pilgrimages for souls.

Modern medicine is characteristically ‘full stop’: life expectancy has risen but dying has become more prolonged.  There is a perversity of demographics: we obsess about youth while some societies diminish as population pyramids invert.

Politicians might promise neat full stops in their manifestos, and autocrats see themselves as the definitive solution.  But democracy is paradoxical: resilient and delicate, disorderly and disciplined, requiring pauses, changes and nuances that go through all kinds of punctuation – and, in the longer term, one semi-colon after another.

We might even reflect on the difference between the ‘full stop’ (in place of the ‘short stop’ comma) and ‘period’; the French ‘point’ and Spanish ‘punto final’.

What else does a ‘full stop’ suggest to you?

Coming soon