Poems with dash exclamation point4/7/2024 The marks' aliases, it turns out, are descriptive! And also alliterative!! And also wonderfully NSFW!!! And all, in their way, glorious.īelow, per Carey, with my additions, is a list of the many names of the exclamation point:ġ. So the language writer Stan Carey, building off of a passage in Henry Hitchings's book The Language Wars, has done something great: He has researched our exclamatory euphemisms. So it's no real surprise that the mark has been the product of a long evolution - and that, in the process, it has been known by many, many names. The exclamation will, despite and because of all the things that make it terrible, survive us all. And that's particularly so in the digital space, which so infamously encourages its proliferation (!!!!). The exclamation mark, I am trying to say, is the cockroach of the punctuation world. Again, it does not matter, because the exclamation point scoffs at your objections, and then extends toward you its peppy version of a middle finger: ! The exclamation mark, I am trying to say, is the cockroach of the punctuation world. The original method of dash-and-dot communication may be controversial it may be, at times, grating it may even drive our discourse - and us along with it - toward the tittering and the too-excited. In delightfulness it is trumped, like every other mark, by the interrobang.īut none of that matters, in the end, because the exclamation point, for all it lacks, has one thing going for it: tenacity. In practicality it is trumped by the comma, the apostrophe, the em-dash, and even, I would venture to say, the semicolon. The exclamation, for all its ubiquity, is neither the most useful nor the most delightful of punctuation marks.
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