The exclamation mark does something to us. While a “!” can be said to inspire a certain amount of playfulness, it can also evoke discomfort: sociologist Theodor Adorno felt the ! signified an “unbearable gesture of authority”. But attitudes to the exclamation mark have fluctuated in recent years. It has fallen out of favour then made a comeback.
In 2015, the product strategist Tami Reiss launched a Gmail plug-in, tellingly named Just Not Sorry, that flags up “undermining” words and expressions, so that writers can rephrase. “Sorry”, “I’m no expert”, and “!” supposedly all “denote lack of confidence”. Frequent use “makes you appear unfit for leadership”, according to economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who advised Reiss.
Meanwhile, anti-exclamation-mark lobbyists such as the education researcher Alyssa Castellanos believe that the exclamation mark “reveals the insecurities of millennials”, who are over-eager to please and working hard to acquire a reputation for chirpy enthusiasm, which might fend off criticism.
Baby boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964) often perceive a !-peppered message as shrieky, while millennials interpret a lack of !s as grumpiness. Gen Z – those born after 1996 – are digital natives who side-step the controversy by throwing emojis into messages with gusto. But divergence in generational opinions about the exclamation mark is probably a result of technology.
An exclamation mark is easily drawn with a pen on paper but, until the late 1970s, typewriters lacked a key for the sign. The typewriter had been developed for accountancy: the need to exclaim was nonexistent.
Once the typewriter moved from commerce into the home, manuals explained how to produce a ! by typing a full stop, backspacing, then dangling an apostrophe over the dot. Doing the !-dance was simply a little too cumbersome to be worth it. Smartphones, on the other hand, allow easy inclusion of any sign via virtual keyboards. Rather than a sign of character, your use of ! is likely to be an indication of your familiarity with modern technology.
In their 2006 guide to email etiquette, Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, editors David Shipley and Will Schwalbe actually recommended using ! since “exclamation points can instantly infuse electronic communication with human warmth”. Perhaps that’s why there also exists a rival Gmail extension: cultural critic Joanne McNeil’s “Emotional Labour” liberally sprinkles messages with one, two, or (if you’re very keen) three exclamation marks in order to feign enthusiasm on the writer’s behalf.
Maybe this is what our prime minister was aiming for when he launched his first bid to lead the Tories. Facing self-declared neo-Thatcherite Liz Truss in the runoff in September, Sunak seemed too sleek, too nondescript, too … boring. “Ready for Rish!” attempted to turn the nerdy kid into part of the cool crowd.
Even so, the stigmatisation of exclamation marks has spilled into teaching: in 2016, the Department for Education issued a directive to downgrade pupils who used them “inappropriately” – that is, for any interjection that does not begin with “oh” or “how” (as in “Oh dear!” and “How stupid!”). The idea, it seems, was to nip extra exclamations in the bud before they became what the Urban Dictionary calls “bangorrhea”, the explosive (and clearly unsavoury) ejecting of !!!!!!.
The exclamation mark has long puzzled and perplexed: in 1611, 300 years after its conception, the English-French dictionary compiler Randle Cotgrave defined ! as “the point of admiration (and detestation)”. In fact, the exclamation mark was the first punctuation to encode feelings at all.
In classical times, PEOPLEWROTELIKETHISMAKINGITREALLYHARDTOSIGHTREADANUNKNOWNTEXT. They considered writing not as a separate manifestation of language, but rather as a record of speech, and it didn’t occur to anybody to distinguish between words or even sentences. This made reading pretty cumbersome and exclusive (you’d have to be well trained in complex Greek and Latin grammar to decipher sentence rhythms).
So, in order to make learning and communication faster and more accessible, forward-thinking teachers, librarians, manuscript copyists and lawmakers introduced spaces between words and marks that would become the signs we still use today. By the ninth century, writers in the west drew on a repertoire of punctuation with a firm grip on sentence structure and intonation. But text is about more than that.
Sometime around the mid-14th century, the Italian scholar Alpoleio da Urbisaglia felt called to compose a treatise on punctuation, adding a completely new sign. Exasperated with people messing up “exclamatory or admirative sentences”, he proposed a full stop with an apostrophe fringe to the side in order to flag up awe.
By the mid-18th century, the exclamation mark had widened its reach and was being used to highlight any “pathetical sentence” – that is, a sentence expressing the passions or feelings, as Dr Johnson writes in his 1755 English Dictionary. In the time of Austen and Keats, ! was appreciated for precisely those qualities that contributed to its falling out of favour in later years.
By 1920, exclamation marks were nowhere to be found, save for political propaganda and advertising. Yet ! was patiently biding its time until the appearance of its true home: the internet, with all its pitfalls and promises of quick and easy communication.
In 2014, Megan Garber asked, “Have we hit peak punctuation?” in an Atlantic article speculating that exclamation marks (among other signs) might soon fall out of favour. But little did she know who was about to stand as candidate for America’s 45th president. From the start of his Twitter use in 2009 to his suspension 11 years later, Donald Trump has been on an exclamation mark bonanza, splattering his 57,000 tweets with 33,000 !s in 12 years, noticeably intensifying his usage since his candidacy in 2015.
Statistical Data website FiveThirtyEight examined the exclamation mark tweet habits of presidential candidates between November 2015 and June 2016, in the run-up to the election, finding that 7% of Hillary Clinton’s tweets contained an exclamation mark, and 9% of Bernie Sanders’s. Both candidates hardly ever vented their feelings with !! or more.
Republican candidate Ted Cruz, on the other hand, stuffed more than 30% of his tweets with at least one !, but the prize of biggest shouter goes, of course, to the man who became president: a whopping 60% of Trump’s tweets during the candidate selection phase contained at least one !. One in 10 tweets had !!, and some !!! or !!!!. His all-time record is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! – that’s 15 exclamation marks – after the announcement that a foreign film had won the Oscar for best movie in 2014.
Most of Trump’s !s tailed monosyllabic, intensifying words such as “sad!” or “very unfair!”. It’s as if Trump had intuited what Dutch social psychology professor Kees van den Bos found a few years earlier: when we see ! flash up on a screen, we tend to make harsher judgments on moral questions, believing a situation to be “very unfair” for example, rather than just “unfair”.
The ! activates the alarm-system in our brain; we get panicky when we see it. The Greeks knew that when they called punctuation “stixes”, which shares a linguistic root with “mark”, “tattoo”, and “bruise”. Sticks and stones can bruise your bones, and exclamation marks can hurt you, too.
But since Trump’s Twitter ban in January 2021, it seems that ! is ready to be rehabilitated. The marketing analytics software TrackMaven examined 1.5m Facebook posts from 6,000 prominent brands, and found there to be three times more interaction with posts that contained at least one exclamation mark.
But ! is doing more than guiding our eyes. The internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch postulates that the exclamation mark does not mean “shouting” any more, but rather works as a “social smile”. Along with ALL CAPS, eeeeeeelongated letters, and slightlie wrng spllng, we deliberately use !!!!!!!!! as a sign of spontaneity and sincerity. The !, McCulloch believes, is no longer an intensifier but evidence of authenticity and emotional intelligence in the murky waters of virtual communications.
The exclamation mark in Sunak’s slogan charts a similar development from bossy to sincere. The ! that did not muster sufficient enthusiasm the first time around boomeranged with a vengeance – but, as Liz Truss knows all too well – an “Oh dear!” or “How stupid!” could easily lie just around the corner.
This article was amended on 17 November 2022. An earlier version stated that the interface consultants NNGroup had recommended, based on “eye-tracking experiments”, that websites use !!! “as a navigation aid”. This recommendation was in fact offered in jest as part of an April fool hoax article, and the reference has been removed.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/T4qGwQ2
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