After a Long Period of Time...

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Recently, when I was talking to someone I did my M A with at Department of English, Calicut University Campus, all these came up to my mind. I was transported back to my university days. It was on a lazy after noon, I was  talking to one of my classmates. Now I am not quite sure what she was talking about. I only knew it was something a teacher had mentioned during the previous hour. I had skipped that particular session, though I wasn't in the habit of missing classes. I told her very casually: "Oh, I missed that period." "You missed WHAT? You missed a PERIOD?" she echoed dubiously, looking rather amused but not pursuing the matter. Nor did I care, as naivety was my second name back then. Maybe, even now at times for sure.

One of the in-house English words I knew from the school I went to was "period". We would say "first period", "second period", "during  the PT period" etc. To me it simply meant a class session lasting 45 to 60 minutes.
As I grew older, I joined BA English and had  British History on our syllubus. The professor said the Victorian period  began in 1837, the year Queen Victoria became Queen, and her period lasted until 1901, the year she died.I had no difficulty conceptualizing a longer timeframe than the one I had used at school, by putting millions of them together. But I still think Victoria must have been an amazing woman to stay in power for such a long period , especially at a time when political assassinations were very common among the European royalty. Even the venerable queen herself had escaped many attempts on her life during her unusually long reign (or shall we call it "period in power").
That wasn't the end of it. Fast forward to the present, and I am working in a foreign university with teachers from about 17 nationalities. In the register we ELT professionals use here, what we mean by  'period' is just a full stop. It is one of the words I have to use frequently when teaching Academic Writing Skills. Most of the text books we use are corpus-informed, based  mainly on North American English. Not sure what will happen next in the Life of Period.

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