The shortest literary correspondence on record is supposed to have taken place in the nineteenth century. The story goes that Victor Hugo, anxious about the fate of his just-published Les Miserables, sent his publisher a telegram that simply asked: “?”. The publisher’s reply: “!”.
That’s one way to use an exclamation mark. In general, many authors have advised caution. Using an exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke, said Scott Fitzgerald. A character in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series says that multiple exclamation marks are a “sure sign of a diseased mind”. And Henry Miller warned: “Keep your exclamation marks under control!”
Grammarians feel the same way. In a 1785 essay on punctuation, Joseph Robertson warned the “young and inexperienced writer against immoderate use” of the exclamation mark, as it leads to “unnatural reveries, rant, and bombast”. And in a 1906 edition of The King’s English, Henry and Francis Fowler snobbishly informed us that using too many is “one of the things that betray the uneducated”.
Today’s language mavens agree. In Eats Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss calls it “unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed,” and in his guide to clarity and style, Benjamin Dreyer notes that when overused, “they’re bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying.” (Let’s ignore for the moment a best-selling guide by Jan Venolia titled Write Right!)
Where did this punctuation mark come from, and why is it viewed with such wariness? That’s the subject of Florence Hazrat’s entertaining and enlightening new book, An Admirable Point. Hazrat, a Berlin-based writer and researcher, takes us on an engaging tour of the exclamation mark, with her interest being kindled by a passion for Renaissance romance novels and their idiosyncratic punctuation.
Nowadays, she writes, the exclamation mark crops up everywhere in our daily lives, “from poetry, museums and high-brow scholarship to ads, tweets and pop culture”. It is “a chameleon whose ability to affect the mood in those encountering it is both welcome and worrisome”.
It all began, says Hazrat, with the Italian scholar and poet Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia in the fourteenth century. He became convinced that there was a need for a new sign to clarify the pronunciation of “exclamatory or admirative sentences,” and came up with “a clear point, and a comma placed to the side above that same point”. Hence the exclamation point, or mark, as it is more commonly referred to in British English nowadays.
The exclamation mark soon caught on, moving from Latin to several other languages: English, Spanish, and French, of course, but also, in varying forms, Arabic, Korean, Mandarin, and others. Its usage was – and remains -- unstable, hovering between irony, surprise and emphasis.
In the right hands, it can cause delight, not dismay. For example, referring to data journalist Ben Blatt’s survey, Hazrat points out that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children contains a staggering 2,131 exclamation marks, which works out to an average of more than six a page. Astonishing!
Some authors have bravely used it in their titles. Dr Seuss is a notable example, with How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and Horton Hears a Who! Among others, there’s P.G. Wodehouse’s Carry on, Jeeves!, Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, and even William Faulkner with Absalom, Absalom!
Anton Chekhov took it a step further in a satirical little story titled ‘The Exclamation Mark’, in which a bureaucrat mocked for punctuation starts to obsess over his usage of commas, full stops, semi-colons, and question marks. But, however much “he furrowed his brow, in his past he did not find a single exclamation mark”. When his wife informs him that it’s used for emotions such as delight, indignation, joy, and anger, he realizes that he has encountered none of these in the documents he has drafted.
If punctuation’s primary purpose is to add oral flavour to the written word, then social media and texting, as Hazrat observes, have lulled us into the illusion that we are speaking when we write. Naturally, there has been a concomitant rise in exclamation marks.
Theodor Adorno may have dismissed it as a “soundless clashing of cymbals”, but this textual noisiness is everywhere in the digital world, including in emojis. For many in the attention economy, it’s one way to get more attention, and its overuse is cacophonic.
However, there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about the exclamation mark, emphasises Hazrat. It is what we make of it, and continues to do what it was invented for: “attend to admiration; point out wonder.” As Chekhov’s protagonist realized, an absence of exclamation marks could well mean an absence of emotion.