Fogg’s Horn The Miscreant Meanderings Of Our Man Markus
The Point of the Exclamation Point. Why is it that almost every sentence in almost every digital communication I receive ends in at least one exclamation point? The exclamation point has become the new period in emails and texts. Or is it a matter of the writer emphasizing, “I meant what I just wrote – really!” So, if there’s just a period there, you only kinda meant it? So, the declaratory sentence no longer declares with just a lame-assed period at its conclusion.
The exclamation mark, !, also sometimes referred to as the exclamation point, especially in American English, is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings, or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, for example: “Watch out!” What better authority than Wikipedia, the ersatz Webster’s Dictionary for the digital age, to explain this. Wikipedia’s choice of demonstrating the mark’s use in a two-word sentence also serves nicely to warn us where
this modern alteration has taken us, in this case an appropriate use of the punctuation mark. Yet, the correspondence I receive must always reflect strong feelings given their closing punctuation mark(s)! Say, what the hell ever happened to the italics as one way to emphasize strong feelings? A global search through the oeuvre of my ever-lengthening writing career has turned up few occurrences where the mark was used, although I’ve never considered myself a milder-mannered practitioner of the language. So, if the exclamation point has become the new period, where is the period off to? Well, I feel we all know the answer to that one: it’s the otherwise-known-as “dot” before com, net, org, edu, et al and how would we navigate through cyberspace without it there. So, digital speech, I say, take this. And
this. And this. This. This. . . . . . . . - 30 -
