I hadn’t thought of the use of the period in a title before
[oh wait] .
But while the debate doesn’t need to end and evolutionary changes like texting may alter written usage, spoken usage, as in the example I highlight, don’t have periods, commas, capital letters or any diacritical marking. Instead, we interpret pauses judging by their lengths as commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, and periods. The word “full stop” sounds like an oral suddenness in spoken language, put the word period doesn’t seem to imply that. There is difference between the spoken word and the written word, and we engage so much in reading—and writing [dash dash]—that we forget the differences and don’t recognize them sometimes. “To say,” in writing, as in “She said,” would really mean to not use any punctuation.
The early written languages left out vowels, spaces and/or capital letters. The reader was specially trained, and literacy was relatively new, and the writing medium very expense, scarce, and, like clay, difficult. Thus room on the medium was a premium and encourage saving space to get down to the essentials. The readers would know that they were directly connecting with spoken words, would have to read these things to illustrate peoples to recreated the spoken word and carry the intent around. The establishment of our current form of written thoughts was centuries in the making, until eventually text became dominant.
Indeed, it did not really become politically dominant until America was established, one could argue. We Americans demand a written Declaration Constitution that all have a right to access on one piece of paper that can be carried around now in the pocket or framed on a wall. Britain doesn’t. Much of their Constitution is Oral, memorized as an oath, not fully accessible. That seems wrong to my mind and I would demand one. A government should not “hide” its objectives and underlying principles “of the people” if really wanting to establish a democracy. Our Declaration was actually such a contractual agreement, signed by at least two representatives from each state to confirm each other was there, then verified under a united leader, or President, and the Secretary, which was like official record keeper. That became the basis for contractual ideas, where the signed contract is the highest form of documentation to settle disputes. Not signing a document is profound, and the power of the American government as seen in the courts and lawyers depends on material contracts and signatures as the primary form of dispute settlement.
Obviously, you helped to open a can of worms, or at least a can of punctuation

[.]