Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [38]
Everyone knows the exclamation mark – or exclamation point, as it is known in America. It comes at the end of a sentence, is unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed, and is known in the newspaper world as a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog’s cock. Here’s one! And here’s another! In humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes), and I can attest there is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.
Despite all the efforts of typewriter manufacturers, you see, the exclamation mark has refused to die out. Introduced by humanist printers in the 15th century, it was known as “the note of admiration” until the mid 17th century, and was defined – in a lavishly titled 1680 book Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and of Notes which are used in Writing and Print; Both very necessary to be well known And the Use of each to be carefully taught – in the following rhyming way:
This stop denotes our Suddain Admiration,
Of what we Read, or Write, or giv Relation,
And is always cal’d an Exclamation.
Ever since it came along, grammarians have warned us to be wary of the exclamation mark, mainly because, even when we try to muffle it with brackets (!), it still shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. Traditionally it is used:
1 in involuntary ejaculations: “Phew! Lord love a duck!”
2 to salute or invoke: “O mistress mine! Where are you roaming?”
3 to exclaim (or admire): “How many goodly creatures are there here!”
4 for drama: “That’s not the Northern Lights, that’s Manderley!”
5 to make a commonplace sentence more emphatic: “I could really do with some Opal Fruits!”
6 to deflect potential misunderstanding of irony: “I don’t mean it!”
Personally, I use exclamation marks for email salutations, where I feel a “Dear Jane” is over-formal. “Jane!” I write, although I am beginning to discover this practice is not universally acceptable. I suppose the rule is: only use an exclamation mark when you are absolutely sure you require such a big effect. H. W. Fowler said, “An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.” On the other hand, it sometimes seems hurtful to suppress the exclamation mark when – after all – it doesn’t mean any harm to anyone, and is so desperately keen.
The question mark, with its elegant seahorse profile, takes up at least double the space on the page of an exclamation mark, yet gets on people’s nerves considerably less. What would we do without it? Like the exclamation mark, it is a development of the full stop, a “terminator”, used only at the ends of sentences, starting out as the punctus interrogativus in the second half of the 8th century, when it resembled a lightning flash, striking from right to left. The name “question mark” (which is rather a dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century, and has never caught on universally. Journalists dictating copy will call it a “query”, and – while we are on the subject of dictation – in this passage from P. G. Wodehouse