The only literary work about punctuation I'm aware of is an odd early story by Anton Chekhov called "The Exclamation Mark." After getting into an argument with a colleague about punctuation, a school inspector named Yefim Perekladin asks his wife what an exclamation point is for. She tells him it signifies delight, indignation, joy and rage. He realizes that in 40 years of writing official reports, he has never had the need to express any of those emotions.As Perekladin obsesses about the mark, it becomes an apparition that haunts his waking life, mocking him as an unfeeling machine. In desperation, he signs his name in a visitors' book and puts three exclamation points after it. All of a sudden, Chekhov writes, "He felt delight and indignation, he was joyful and seethed with rage."Yefim Perekladin, c'est moi! At least, I used to be one of those people who use the exclamation point as sparingly as possible. We'll grudgingly stick one in after an interjection or a sentence like "What a jerk!" but never to punch up an ordinary sentence in an essay or email. We say we're saving them for special occasions, but they never seem to arise.The written language provides us with a dozen or so punctuation marks to clarify our meaning, but only one that conveys our feelings about what we're saying. Yet the exclamation point gets no love at all. Apple computer forbids its distributors to use it in their ads. The British school curriculum penalizes students for using it. There's a blog called Excessive Exclamation!! dedicated to documenting its misuse.It wasn't always so disreputable. Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne used it freely. But by the late 19th century, it had become the staple of lurid novels and the sensational yellow press, whose printers called it a screamer, a shriek or a bang.Ever since then, self-respecting authors have regarded the wanton use of exclamation points as illiterate and slightly vulgar. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that it was like laughing at your own joke.The mark was banished to the literary margins. Manual typewriters didn't even give it a key of its own. You had to type a period, then backspace and then type an apostrophe, by which time any spontaneous excitement would have fizzled away. It lived most of its life on the pulp paper of Nancy Drew mysteries and Superman comics. Tom Wolfe and Roy Lichtenstein made it the emblem of pop culture kitsch: "POW!" "WHAMM!" "VAROOM!"To be sure, most people pay no attention to the qualms of editors and grammarians and have always used exclamation points freely in their letters and diaries. Nobody found that alarming until the marks began to surface in emails and texts. Critics suddenly discerned a plague, an exclamation point addiction that copy editors call "bangorrhea."The impression is understandable. Exclamation points have become so obligatory in email that it can sound brusque to merely write, "See you then." People scatter them with abandon in texts and tweets to convey friendliness, surprise or indignation. Others use them for pure emphasis-- they write their message in all caps and then hold the exclamation point key down to string them out like a row of air horns.Of course, the more the bangs pile up, the more numbing they become. But the moral panic is overdone. We're not talking about The New York Times, after all. Texts and tweets are just an extension of spoken language. We punctuate them to capture the way we talk, and we aren't always going to use our indoor voices. I think of the Seinfeld episode when Elaine and her boyfriend broke up after he took down a phone message that her friend Myra had a baby without putting an exclamation point at the end.
After Years Of Restraint, A Linguist Says 'Yes!' To The Exclamation Point
