Making a Point (18 page)

20

Exclamation marks!!

It's time you went home!

In
Chapter 4
, I noted the arrival in English of the ‘point of admiration' during the late fourteenth century. The terminology soon evolved. By the seventeenth century we find it being called a ‘note of admiration', ‘admirative point', and ‘sign of admiration', as well as ‘wonderer' and ‘note of exclamation'. There was evidently some uncertainty over the best way of capturing the meanings involved, judging by the definition in Randle Cotgrave's French/English dictionary of 1611, where he defines
admiratif
as ‘Th'admirative point, or point of admiration (and of detestation)'.

Dr Johnson ignored the earlier variants and went for ‘exclamation', which he defined as ‘A note by which a pathetical sentence is marked thus !' (
pathetical
: ‘affecting the passions'), and this seems to have influenced the grammarians Bishop Lowth and Lindley Murray – both of whom call it an ‘exclamation point' – and everyone else after them. This is the usage which became dominant in the USA. In Britain, ‘exclamation mark' became the norm. But the nineteenth century did see several further alternatives. In the anonymous (though attributed to Percival Leigh)
Comic English Grammar
(1840), the author says that ‘the notes
of admiration
which we so often hear in theatres' are called ‘notes of hand'. Goold Brown, in his
Institutes of English Grammar
(1890), calls the
mark an ‘ecphoneme'. And, as I mentioned earlier (p. 73), in Henry Alford's
The Queen's English
(1864) we see the printers blamed for inserting ‘shrieks' all over the place. The newspaper world around the end of that century added several more, such as ‘astonisher', ‘gasper', ‘screamer', ‘startler', and ‘shout'. In computer jargon, the list goes on and on: ‘bang', ‘pling', ‘wham', ‘smash', ‘yell', ‘cuss', ‘boing', ‘wow' …

No other punctuation mark has attracted such criticism in modern times as the exclamation mark. The antagonism isn't restricted to pedantic stylists. Some very well-known authors have taken against them. Mark Twain opens his essay ‘How to Tell a Story' (1897) by warning comic writers against the depressing habit of shouting at the reader, including the use of ‘whooping exclamation-points', which, he says, makes him ‘want to renounce joking and lead a better life'. And there's a much-quoted remark attributed to F Scott Fitzgerald: ‘Cut out all these exclamation points', adding ‘An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.' Repeated marks attract particular criticism. One of the characters in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel
Eric
(1990) insists that ‘Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.'

The antipathy seems to have set in during the late nineteenth century, as part of a general feeling that writers, editors, and printers had rather overdone their preference for heavy punctuation. We see exclamation marks littering the pages in editions of Shakespeare, for instance. Take this line from
Romeo and Juliet
when the Nurse tries to wake Juliet (4.5.12). Modern editions (such as Arden, Oxford, Penguin) print it thus:

What, dressed, and in your clothes, and down again?

The Albion edition of the plays (1889) prints it thus:

What, dress'd! and in your clothes! and down again!

This was typical of the popular writing of the day.
Punch
, my first port of call for data about linguistic trends in the nineteenth century, gives us evidence in its very first issue in 1841, parodying the popular cheap novels of the day. Mr Punch plans to write a best-seller, ‘terse and abrupt in style', which he calls
Clare Grey: A Novel
. In this extract from Volume III, Tom, back from the wars, has just heard that his lady-love Clare is marrying Job Snooks:

Can't be—No go—Stump up to church—Too true—Clare just made Mrs. Snooks–Madness!! rage !!! death!!!!

And it is in the pages of
Punch
, especially in the cartoon captions, that we often see the exclamation replacing entire utterances, as in my illustration from A A Milne (p. 30).

Multiple exclamations, along with dashes, were always a feature of informal letter-writing between intimates, where we see a natural ‘inflation' taking place as someone's letter proceeds. If writers use such a mark to express emotional level 1, at the beginning of their letter, there's a likelihood it will be increasingly repeated as their news unfolds:

I'm fine! …

You'll never guess what happened!! …

I met Julian again!!! …

And he wants to come over!!!!

Once you're on the exclamation bus, it's difficult to get off. And if you try to, you can easily convey the opposite of what you intended.

I'm fine! …

You'll never guess what happened!! …

I met Julian again!!! …

And he wants to come over!

A one-exclamation-mark meeting now suggests a much less exciting prospect. And a zero-exclamation-mark would sound even worse:

And he wants to come over.

We'll see this inflation problem arise again in relation to the Internet.

The appeal of the exclamation has continued into the online era. Indeed, frequent and multiple use is one of the defining features of Internet orthography. It's the most-used alternative to zero as a sentence-ending in fast-moving online exchanges, as illustrated by the IATEFL chatbox in the previous chapter, where it closed nearly a third of the messages. Multiple use is fostered by the ease with which the mark can be produced on a modern keyboard, simply by holding down the key. Messages with half-a-dozen exclamations aren't at all unusual, and I've seen instances, when a sender has got really excited about something, of a sequence in which entire lines are taken up by them. This could never have happened in the early typewriter era, where the machines had no separate key for an exclamation. To type one you had to type a period, then back-space and hold the shift key down while you typed an apostrophe. Not very user-friendly.

Who are the frequent users of exclamations? There's a history of associating them with youth and gender. Several studies since the 1970s have analysed male and female writing from this point of view, and usually found that women use exclamations far more than men, whether in traditional writing or online. For example, in a small but illuminating study for the online
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
(2006), Carol Waseleski examined the use
of exclamations in posts made to two electronic discussion lists. She found that women used them far more often than men – 73 per cent of all exclamations.

That's the easy bit. The difficult part comes when we try to explain why this is so. People who hear of this result usually jump to the conclusion that it must be because women are more emotional or excitable than men, so they will exclaim more often. However, Waseleski's study showed that this was not the case. Less than 10 per cent of the exclamation-pointed sentences indicated strong emotions, whether positive or negative, and where they did, they were equally distributed between the sexes. Indeed, there was a hint that the men were more excitable than the women, especially when it came to ‘flaming' (angry Internet exchanges). Rather, the women used the mark more often when thanking, appreciating, welcoming, and generally contributing to what has been called a ‘supportive' style of communication.

The dangers of superficial generalizations become apparent when we consider the range of meanings that an exclamation can convey: apology, challenge, agreement, call to action, statement of fact, friendship, argument, hostility, sarcasm, thanks … the list seems endless. Here's a short selection of contexts where the mark would be routinely used these days:

• interjections –
  Oh!
  
• expletives –
  Damn!
  
• greetings –
  Happy Xmas!
  
• calls –
  Johnny!
  
• commands –
  Stop!
  
• expressions of surprise –
  What a mess!
  
• emphatic statements –
  I want to see you now!
  
• attention-getters
  – Listen carefully!
  
• loud speech in dialogue –
  I'm in the garden!
  
• ironic comments –
  He paid, for a change!
  or
  … for a change (!)
  
• strong mental attitudes –
  ‘Hardly!' he thought
  

A complete list of situations would be impossibly long, as it would need to identify all the emotions that could motivate the use of the mark. But the last two contexts show how easy it is to make a false generalization, such as ‘exclamations show that the speech is louder'. There's no sound at all in the last example. Nor was there when Christopher Robin realized that Pooh was right (p. 30).

With so many meanings at its disposal, it's hardly surprising that exclamations are frequent, especially in writing where a strong element of social bonding is present. This is why they have become so common on the Internet. As I'll discuss later in relation to emoticons, there's an inevitable distancing effect that accompanies the detached appearance of online exchanges, which lack the facial expressions and tones of voice that express attitude in any face-to-face spoken conversation. This clashes with the expectations of social networking exchanges, forums, emails, instant messages, text-messages, and other activities where people want to express warmth and personality. Any device that will add solidarity and rapport is thus very welcome, and exclamations seem to be the punctuation of choice to enable this to happen. As David Shipley and Will Schwalbe say, in their book
Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better
(2007):

Because email is without affect it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be.

But of course the overuse of any linguistic feature can lead to precisely the same kind of dulling effect. The ideal is to find some sort of balance.

In the twentieth century, the concern over excessive or inappropriate use of exclamation marks stems chiefly from the attitude of Henry Watson Fowler, in his various writings, and especially in
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(1926). (Surprisingly, the other big influence on style in that century, Ernest Gowers's
Plain Words
(1948) has nothing to say about exclamation marks, in its section on punctuation.) In the entry on ‘stops', Fowler condemns the ‘excessive use of exclamation marks [as] one of the things that betray the uneducated or unpractised writer', and elsewhere he adds that it shows the kind of writer ‘who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational'. He excludes the case of poetry, but in prose he advises everyone to confine the use of the mark to what grammar recognizes as exclamations, and to avoid it after statements, questions, and commands.

Fowler gives a list of what he considers to be the grammatical cases (the following examples are from his book). They are: interjections (
oh!
), expletives (
heavens!
,
my God!
), sentences introduced by
what
and
how
(
What a difference it makes!
,
How I love you!
), wishes (
God forbid!
), emotional ellipses (
If only I could!
), emotional inversions (
A fine friend you have been!
), and apostrophes (in the rhetorical sense of ‘address', as in
You little dear!
).

If Fowler had left it at that, the situation would be fairly clear. But he knows that ‘the matter is not quite so simple', and he breaks his principle by accepting the necessity of adding an exclamation mark to statements ‘to convey that the tone is not merely what would be natural to the words themselves, but is that suitable to scornful quotation, to the unexpected, the amusing, the disgusting, or something that needs the comment of special intonation to secure that the words shall be taken as they are meant'. He illustrates from such sentences as:

You thought it didn't matter!

Each is as bad as the other, only more so!

He puts his knife in his mouth!

These are acceptable, he says. But he then disallows:

This is a lie!

My heart was in my mouth!

Who cares!

He comments about the latter: ‘the words themselves suffice to show the tone', and so an exclamation mark would show ‘only that the writer does not know his business'.

But anyone who tries to use this distinction as a guideline for good practice is soon going to get into trouble, as
any
sentence can be given a special intonation to express an emotion that goes beyond what the words convey. ‘This is a lie' could be said in several tones of voice. ‘Who cares' could appear as a genuine enquiry – ‘Who cares?' Indeed, one of my own books had a title which played on exactly this intonational ambiguity:
Who Cares About English Usage?

That's the problem with the pedantry that surrounds this topic: it's easy enough to complain about excessive use; it's not to easy to write rules that say when such marks are appropriate and when they aren't. Never use five exclamation marks? Tell that to the Ghost at the Opera House in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel
Maskerade
(1995), who sends the message:

Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha! BEWARE!!!!!

The punctuation doesn't impress the musical director at the opera house, Salzella:

What sort of person sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure
sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.