I gazed at this message for some time. The fact that this young man was going to be late was of little interest; the fact that he had used one full stop, two commas and one semicolon to tell me so was of very great interest indeed. If a 26-year-old sends elaborately punctuated text messages, does this herald the end of an era? Could it be, I wondered, that the lower-case, hey-there, c-u-l8r age of business language is over?

One electronic swallow doesn't make a summer, but the very next day another swallow winged its way across my computer screen. It was an e-mail from the UK head of internal communications at Google, formerly the coolest company in the world. It did not begin “yo lucy!”, or even “hey there”. Instead it started: “Dear Ms Kellaway”. It proceeded to issue a civil invitation to speak at an event and finished: “I look forward to hearing from you.” The message was signed off “Yours sincerely”, followed by the man's full name.

If Google employees have forsworn the language of the internet and are now composing e-mails in the manner recommended by Debrett's Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners, something must be shifting somewhere.