A word and a punctuation symbol that bother me

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

I have something to say about the Ohio Senate race, but I am going to save that until we are closer to the election time.  

In the meantime …

There is a word that has bothered me for a long time. It is the word “guy” or “guys.”  

I think my mother got me hooked on this back about 1965 or 1966. It was a Sunday, and we had just gotten home from church at the Marshall United Methodist Church. There had been a special, traveling group of youth singers at church that morning.  

Bob Armstrong (the late husband of Donna Armstrong) was the Sunday School superintendent and was standing at his usual place at the front of the church. The leader of this traveling group had referred to Bob as “this guy.”

My mother was horrified and let our family know about it when we got home. She thought it completely disrespectful to refer to Bob as “this guy.”  

I have spent 60 years since then trying to come up with a word that would show respect and retire “guys” or “you guys.” If you have any better word, please let me know.

My punctuation angst is of more recent origin. I propose that we get rid of the period (.) at the end of paragraphs and the end of documents. It serves no purpose. Periods within a paragraph are necessary to separate sentences. But at the end of a paragraph or the end of a document they are unnecessary.

For instance, in this document thus far, there are seven periods I could eliminate. This could lead to tremendous energy savings.  

For instance, above, before this paragraph, I have written 1,200 characters. ChatGPT tells me a period represents about 2% to 5% of the average character. Seven periods out of 1,200 characters represents about 0.58% of all characters. Sounds tiny, eh?

Well, again referring to ChatGPT, it tells us there are about two billion computer keyboards in use around the world. Going a bit further (I’ll skip boring math), there are about 650 billion pages typed per year.

Based on my trial here, this represents 6 x 650 billion, or 3.9 trillion extra key strokes for these unnecessary periods. Again, skipping the math, this is about 0.003 foot-pounds per keystroke or 11.700 billion foot-pounds of human effort worldwide for all these extra keystrokes.  

No wonder you are tired after a day’s work at the computer.  

So, I will leave you with this. All the periods in all the documents typed per year (includes necessary as well as unnecessary ones) covers an area about the size of Rhode Island.

Do your part. Eliminate unnecessary periods. It is the environmental thing to do!

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.

• Publisher's note: The em dash takes three key strokes – a space, a long dash, and another space. Long live both the em dash and the period.