As I write this, the 15 most recent tweets from the president of the United States all contain either one or two exclamation marks.
Yet over the past decade, and especially over the past couple of years, it seems the whole world has caught banghorrea. There's a town in England called "Westward Ho!".ĭid you really send that email without an exclamation mark?
EXCLAMATION MARK TEXT GIRL MOVIE
You might find one in a musical ( Oliver!) or a tongue-in-cheek movie title ( Airplane!). There was the odd book title such as Kiwi author Frank Sargeson's 1977 memoir Never Enough!. Unusual and non-standard usages were sufficiently rare that they stood out. Until the 1970s, most typewriters didn't even have a dedicated key for the symbol: you had to use a single quote (') then backspace the carriage and add a fullstop beneath. Comedy-fantasy writer Terry Pratchett went further, correlating overuse with outright insanity: one character's descent into madness is signalled by his use of double, then triple, then quadruple and finally quintiple exclamation marks.Ī more creative critique of the exclamation mark came in 1962, when American ad agency boss Martin K Speckter announced the symbol lacked nuance and invented the "interrobang", a mix of exclamation and question marks that looks like this – ‽ – and which was tailormade for an emphatic or rhetorical sentence such as "Who forgot to put gas in the car‽"Īnyway, for a long time, such high-minded disdain for the exclamation mark kept usage under control.
(Seriously, YOU try finding this many different ways to illustrate a story about punctuation.)į Scott Fitzgerald reportedly told a young writer that "An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke". The third volume of Frank Sargeson's memoirs was entitled "Never Enough!" which, you will note, contains an exclamation mark. And one of those rules was that you go easy with the exclamation marks. Some years as a newspaper sub-editor only cemented my enthusiasm for rule-based order on the printed page. I know punctuation saves lives – compare "duck" with "duck!", and note the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" with "Let's eat Grandma". Some background: I was schooled early in the proper use of the semicolon and the possessive apostrophe, the subjunctive and the infinitive, and the Oxford comma.
EXCLAMATION MARK TEXT GIRL SERIAL
So I browsed back through my sent emails and text-message exchanges, through my WhatsApp and Messenger threads, and it turns out that in this regard, Google was right on the button: over the past couple of years, without even noticing, I have become a serial over-user of a piece of punctuation so disreputable that it's known as the "screamer", the "shriekmark", the "gasper", the "slammer", the "bang", the "shoutymark" and, most revoltingly, the "dog's dick". Let there be exclamation marks! But perhaps not quite so many, please. Where is the "nah I can't be arsed" option, or the "fat chance" button? Where can I click on "please unsubscribe me from your wretched press-release database and Never Ever send me another email again"? Where, I wonder, is all the swearing?īut really, what irked me most about this buffet of chirpy comebacks was the way Google had placed a shouty exclamation mark at the end of virtually every canned response – and surely that's not how I write. But if that's the case, how come all the options are so polite? Supposedly, Google drafts these answers after sophisticated analysis of both the incoming email itself, and my own writing style in previous responses. Innocuous enough, I guess, but these soft-cornered little boxes of baby-blue good cheer annoy the hell out of me.įor a start, why are Silicon Valley geeks presuming to tell me what to say to my friends and colleagues? Personalised computer algorithms cause me enough angst already, mostly in the form of repeated Facebook ads for saggy-skin solutions for men over 45.
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