Making a Point

by David Crystal

  That’s the easy bit. The difficult part comes when we try to explain why this is so. People who hear of this result usually jump to the conclusion that it must be because women are more emotional or excitable than men, so they will exclaim more often. However, Waseleski’s study showed that this was not the case. Less than 10 per cent of the exclamation-pointed sentences indicated strong emotions, whether positive or negative, and where they did, they were equally distributed between the sexes. Indeed, there was a hint that the men were more excitable than the women, especially when it came to ‘flaming’ (angry Internet exchanges). Rather, the women used the mark more often when thanking, appreciating, welcoming, and generally contributing to what has been called a ‘supportive’ style of communication.

  The dangers of superficial generalizations become apparent when we consider the range of meanings that an exclamation can convey: apology, challenge, agreement, call to action, statement of fact, friendship, argument, hostility, sarcasm, thanks … the list seems endless. Here’s a short selection of contexts where the mark would be routinely used these days:

  interjections – Oh!

  expletives – Damn!

  greetings – Happy Xmas!

  calls – Johnny!

  commands – Stop!

  expressions of surprise – What a mess!

  emphatic statements – I want to see you now!

  attention-getters – Listen carefully!

  loud speech in dialogue – I’m in the garden!

  ironic comments – He paid, for a change! or … for a change (!)

  strong mental attitudes – ‘Hardly!’ he thought

  A complete list of situations would be impossibly long, as it would need to identify all the emotions that could motivate the use of the mark. But the last two contexts show how easy it is to make a false generalization, such as ‘exclamations show that the speech is louder’. There’s no sound at all in the last example. Nor was there when Christopher Robin realized that Pooh was right (p. 30).

  With so many meanings at its disposal, it’s hardly surprising that exclamations are frequent, especially in writing where a strong element of social bonding is present. This is why they have become so common on the Internet. As I’ll discuss later in relation to emoticons, there’s an inevitable distancing effect that accompanies the detached appearance of online exchanges, which lack the facial expressions and tones of voice that express attitude in any face-to-face spoken conversation. This clashes with the expectations of social networking exchanges, forums, emails, instant messages, text-messages, and other activities where people want to express warmth and personality. Any device that will add solidarity and rapport is thus very welcome, and exclamations seem to be the punctuation of choice to enable this to happen. As David Shipley and Will Schwalbe say, in their book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better (2007):

  Because email is without affect it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be.

  But of course the overuse of any linguistic feature can lead to precisely the same kind of dulling effect. The ideal is to find some sort of balance.

  In the twentieth century, the concern over excessive or inappropriate use of exclamation marks stems chiefly from the attitude of Henry Watson Fowler, in his various writings, and especially in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). (Surprisingly, the other big influence on style in that century, Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words (1948) has nothing to say about exclamation marks, in its section on punctuation.) In the entry on ‘stops’, Fowler condemns the ‘excessive use of exclamation marks [as] one of the things that betray the uneducated or unpractised writer’, and elsewhere he adds that it shows the kind of writer ‘who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational’. He excludes the case of poetry, but in prose he advises everyone to confine the use of the mark to what grammar recognizes as exclamations, and to avoid it after statements, questions, and commands.

  Fowler gives a list of what he considers to be the grammatical cases (the following examples are from his book). They are: interjections (oh!), expletives (heavens!, my God!), sentences introduced by what and how (What a difference it makes!, How I love you!), wishes (God forbid!), emotional ellipses (If only I could!), emotional inversions (A fine friend you have been!), and apostrophes (in the rhetorical sense of ‘address’, as in You little dear!).

  If Fowler had left it at that, the situation would be fairly clear. But he knows that ‘the matter is not quite so simple’, and he breaks his principle by accepting the necessity of adding an exclamation mark to statements ‘to convey that the tone is not merely what would be natural to the words themselves, but is that suitable to scornful quotation, to the unexpected, the amusing, the disgusting, or something that needs the comment of special intonation to secure that the words shall be taken as they are meant’. He illustrates from such sentences as:

  You thought it didn’t matter!

  Each is as bad as the other, only more so!

  He puts his knife in his mouth!

  These are acceptable, he says. But he then disallows:

  This is a lie!

  My heart was in my mouth!

  Who cares!

  He comments about the latter: ‘the words themselves suffice to show the tone’, and so an exclamation mark would show ‘only that the writer does not know his business’.

  But anyone who tries to use this distinction as a guideline for good practice is soon going to get into trouble, as any sentence can be given a special intonation to express an emotion that goes beyond what the words convey. ‘This is a lie’ could be said in several tones of voice. ‘Who cares’ could appear as a genuine enquiry – ‘Who cares?’ Indeed, one of my own books had a title which played on exactly this intonational ambiguity: Who Cares About English Usage?

  That’s the problem with the pedantry that surrounds this topic: it’s easy enough to complain about excessive use; it’s not to easy to write rules that say when such marks are appropriate and when they aren’t. Never use five exclamation marks? Tell that to the Ghost at the Opera House in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Maskerade (1995), who sends the message:

  Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Aahahaha! BEWARE!!!!!

  The punctuation doesn’t impress the musical director at the opera house, Salzella:

  What sort of person sits down and writes a maniacal laugh? And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head. Opera can do that to a man.

  It’s a character note, nonetheless. As it would be for the demon who put the notice on the door to Hell in Pratchett’s Eric (You Don’t Have To Be ‘Damned’ To Work Here, But It Helps!!!), eliciting Rincewind’s wry comment that I mentioned earlier: ‘Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.’ When we note the way some authors revel in the use of exclamation marks, it’s clear that literary usage sends us mixed messages. The Twains and Fitzgeralds of this world are the ones most quoted; but there’s another side, when we see these marks used wisely and well. To follow advice that says simply ‘cut them out’ is just plain daft, as it eliminates virtually everything we would ever want to read. And it would put us in a very awkward position as we live our daily lives.

  Exclamation marks are unavoidable these days. They litter our roads, warning of danger ahead. They alert us to urgent electronic messages. They appear as an identity mark above a character’s head in some video games. And they are there in all sorts of specialized settings, such as mathematics, computer languages, and Internet slang. In phonetics, the mark is a symbol representing an alveolar click sound (as in tut tut). In comics, it usually shows a character’s surprise or shock, often by the symbol appearing alone in a bubble, in varying sizes (depending on the intensity of the moment). In chess notation, along with the question mark it is part of a family of semantic contrasts: ! indicates a good move; !! a brilliant move; ?! a dubious m
ove; and !? an interesting but risky move.

  The exclamation mark can even get into proper names. Places include Westward Ho! in Devon and an intriguing family of names in Quebec: the tiny parish municipality of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! and its local river (Rivière Ha! Ha!) and bay (Baie des Ha! Ha!) – a haha, according to local historians, being an old French word for an unexpected obstacle (presumably encountered when the area was first being explored). Oklahoma! has one too, in the name of the musical – though the innovation caught Helene Hanff by surprise. She records, in Underfoot in Show Business, how she was working at the Theatre Guild on the press release for the new show, to be called Oklahoma. She and a colleague had mimeographed 10,000 sheets when there was a phone call. This is how she tells it:

  Joe picked up the phone and we heard him say, ‘Yes, Terry,’ and ‘All right, dear,’ and then he hung up. And then he looked at us, in the dazed way people who worked at the Guild frequently looked at each other.

  ‘They want,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘an exclamation point after “Oklahoma.”’

  Which is how it happened that, far into the night, Lois and I, bundled in our winter coats, sat in the outer office putting 30,000 exclamation points on 10,000 press releases …

  Among people, there is a US dance-punk band called !!! – pronounced (it would seem from their website) ‘Chk Chk Chk’ – a motif that continues in the title of their album THR!!!ER, released in 2013. Among individuals, pride of place has surely to go to the writer Elliot S! Maggin, known to enthusiasts of Superman, Batman, and other comics. Maggin recounts the story of his middle initial like this:

  I got into the habit of putting exclamation marks at the end of sentences instead of periods because reproduction on pulp paper was so lousy. So once, by accident, when I signed a script I put the exclamation point after my ‘S’ because I was just used to going to that end of the typewriter at the time. And Julie [his editor, Julius Schwartz] saw it, and before he told me, he goes into the production room and issues a general order that any mention of Elliot Maggin’s name will be punctuated with an exclamation mark rather than a period from now on until eternity.

  And so it came to pass.

  One of the main indications of the ambiguity surrounding the use of the exclamation mark is its overlap with the question mark. It’s an ambiguity within grammar as well as punctuation, and in speech as well as writing, reflected in such utterances as ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’ Sometimes the answer is ‘both’: a person can query and be surprised at the same time. This is what led to the typographical experiment to devise a new combined mark. Martin K Speckter, an adman with a strong personal interest in typography, suggested it in an article in Type Talks in 1962. He had noticed that copywriters often used the two marks in the sequences ?! and !? and thought it would be useful to link them into a single symbol (). What to call the new mark? Suggestions included ‘emphaquest’, ‘interrapoint’, ‘exclarogative’, ‘consternation mark’, ‘exclamaquest’, and other blends, but the one he chose (incorporating an earlier slang term for an exclamation) was interrobang. It attracted a flurry of interest, but not enough to change traditional printing practices, and it largely disappeared from view during the 1970s. However, it is still encountered as a cult usage online, and it even exists as a Unicode character, so it may yet have a future. In the meantime we are left with the two old stalwarts.

  Interlude: Inverting exclamation

  ¡

  Innovation in the use of the exclamation mark has a long history. John Wilkins, in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1688), a work that in its detail anticipated Roget’s Thesaurus, decided that the normal set of punctuation marks wasn’t enough to handle all the meanings people want to express. In his view, the main deficiency was in relation to irony:

  the distinction of meaning and intention of any words, when they are to be understood by way of Sarcasm or scoff, or in a contrary sense to that which they naturally signifie.

  In Chapter 9 of Part 3, ‘Concerning Natural Grammar’, he observes:

  And though there be not (for ought I know) any note designed for this in any of the Instituted Languages, yet that is from their deficiency and imperfection,

  and he concludes:

  there ought to be some mark for direction, when things are to be so pronounced.

  So, in Chapter 14, as part of his new writing system, he proposes an inverted exclamation mark. It never caught on, though it has had a recent resurgence online (see Chapter 33).

  21

  Next, question marks?

  It’s time you went home?

  By contrast with its exclamatory cousin, the question mark has attracted little notice over the years. This is because people think it has just one, obvious, semantic function: to show that somebody has asked a question. And they feel that the concept of ‘asking a question’ is so basic and straightforward, so well grounded in English grammar, that uncertainty over its use could never arise. Gertrude Stein held that view (as we’ll see at the very end of this book). There isn’t even much variation in terminology, over the centuries, apart from an early use of ‘asker’ and a scholarly use of ‘eroteme’ (from a Greek word meaning ‘question’). Everyone seems to have focused on the terms ‘interrogation’ or ‘question’, so we find expressions such as ‘mark of interrogation’, ‘interrogative point’, and the interesting (but short-lived) nineteenth-century use of ‘question-stop’. Today, ‘question mark’ has no competition.

  Are people right to think in this way? Is it so straightforward? Yes and no. The main use of the question mark is indeed much more clear-cut than in the case of the exclamation mark. But there are a few complications, partly arising from the imperfect relationship between writing and speech, and partly from the way fashions in English grammatical usage have changed in recent years. Moreover, the changes seem to be on the increase. So this chapter turns out to be just as long as its predecessor.

  What do I mean by ‘well grounded in English grammar’? The grammar-books present us with a set of rules that are clear and concise, recognizing the following question-types.

  Yes/no-questions, as the name suggests, prompt the answer yes or no (or of course I don’t know, etc). They’re formed by changing the order of the subject and verb: You are going to town. > Are you going to town?

  They were ready. > Were they ready?

  Wh-questions (also called open-ended questions) begin with a question-word such as what, why, or how, and again change the word-order: What are they doing?

  Where did they put the book?

  Alternative questions, a sub-type of yes/no-questions, present an either/or situation, where the answer can’t be yes or no: Are you awake or asleep?

  These question-types rarely present any problems of punctuation. It’s been standard practice since the eighteenth century to end them with a question mark, and it would be considered a basic error if one were omitted. Only a very daring literary user gets away with it (such as Gertrude Stein or James Joyce). But some punctuational issues do arise in relation to a fourth question-type.

  The tag question, which can be positive or negative, makes an assertion, and then invites the listener’s response to it: They’re going, are they?

  They’re going, aren’t they?

  The meanings here are trickier, as they reflect the intonation with which they can be spoken. If I use a rising tone, I’m asking you. If I use a falling tone, I’m telling you.

  It’s three o’clock, ísn’t it? (asking)

  It’s three o’clock, ìsn’t it? (telling)

  It’s this last example that gives us a problem, for if someone is ‘telling’ us, what need of a question mark? To make the difference between these last two sentences clear in writing, therefore, we will often see this:

  It’s three o’clock, isn’t it? (asking)

  It’s three o’clock, isn’t it. (telling) or even It’s three o’clock, isn’t it!

  But the orthographic dis
tinction isn’t standard, so that we often have to look carefully at the context to work out which meaning a writer intended, and it isn’t always clear. It’s one of the pitfalls over the use of the question mark that writers need to be aware of.

  Here’s another example of the same kind. I saw this request on a classroom door:

  Would the last student to leave this room please turn off the light.

  This looks like a question, but it has the force of a command. There was no question mark at the end. Should there have been? The force of the request would have been very different if it had read:

  Would the last student to leave this room please turn off the light?

  This turns it into a genuine question, offering the option of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. We might interpret such a version in various ways – more inviting, perhaps, or more of a desperate plea! But we don’t usually find a question mark in such circumstances. The writer is telling, not asking.

  What we’re seeing, in these cases, is an echo of the old controversy: does punctuation reflect grammar or pronunciation. The question mark began as a way of giving preachers a useful graphic cue about when to adopt a questioning tone of voice. By the end of the eighteenth century it had been firmly tied to grammatical constructions. Today, punctuation is often used as a way of by-passing grammar and directly representing pronunciations that reflect the intentions lying behind a sentence. It’s this pragmatic function that accounts for the asking/telling issue, and it appears again in the commonest contemporary trend: the punctuation of ‘uptalk’.