No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place. -Isaac Babel, author (1894-1940)?

We (a coworker and I) don't get it. What is the meaning of the "period in the right place"?

Thanks

WELCOME, L.

welcome, lamaya.

my take is that stopping a thought at the right time can give powerful meaning to a sentence that otherwise might ramble on, losing its power.

Joe Bob: Sue comes on as such a total loser when she takes that attitude with her friends.

Ella May: You could have put that period a lot sooner, Joe Bob.

Isaak Babel is one of the great 20th century Russian writers. Stalin had him and a bunch of other Soviet writers murdered in January 1940.

Yes...thats how I see it too.

If you remember telegrams....well they used the full word 'STOP' cause, any punctuation cost the sender more.

In physiology, a refractory period is a period of time during which an organ or cell is incapable of repeating a particular action, or (more precisely) the amount of time it takes for an excitable membrane to be ready for a second stimulus once it returns to its resting state following an excitation. It most commonly refers to electrically excitable muscle cells or neurons.

Action potentials in neurons are also known as "nerve impulses" or "spikes", and the temporal sequence of action potentials generated by a neuron is called its "spike train". A neuron that emits an action potential is often said to "fire".

Anyway..along the lines of censorship...knowing when to act and when not to act was my line of thought.....

WELCOME, CRASH

Thanks for the welcome LukeJavan8.