Although I don’t remember when I learned about exclamation points, I do remember that I learned to use them for surprises, for atypical occasions, for moments of fright or shock or wonder. The implicit lesson—there’s a teacher, a blackboard, and a sleepy classroom in this hazy scene from my childhood—is that exclamation points aren’t for everyday, prosaic situations, and that you can’t toss them around too often, because you want to ensure that they bite. Increasing the frequency will simply detract from the effect.
As you can tell from the previous paragraph, I am nearly two hundred years old. What I learned in elementary school doesn’t merely look dated, it appears, in some ways, to be the punctuation of another language. Of course how we communicate is forever shifting, with the words we use and the accents we pick up and the grammar that seems so fundamental to our identity mere relics of our time, haphazard, contingent, liquidlike, rather than anything that we might call timeless. Nevertheless, the way in which exclamation points are used today, as staccato beats to every sentence, sprayed from a machine gun onto every page and inserted throughout text messages, certainly feels like a startling, unexpected change.
Although that change in frequency does align with other changes in the language. Such as how another lesson that I learned in school, about subtlety, about texture, about discernment in comparisons, now appears to look rather quaint. Just as exclamation points were intended for anomalies but are now used on grocery lists and thank you messages, the artfulness of a sentence, I was taught, resembles its refinement, its ability to be playful, oblique, its ability to approach a subject with nuance and accuracy and style, unlike the approach, seen today, of grandiosity.
The speakers that captivated me when I first started to read more advanced books revealed how understatement, illusion, and precision enhanced their words. What I read came alive in my mind because the capacity to communicate with such precision permitted my imagination to see literature as expansive, to feel sentences with a capacious, lifelike potential that didn’t retreat from complexity. Straight talk, direct speech, simple phrases, to me, took all the beauty and flair and life out of language. I didn’t want to be a computer. I didn’t want to simply repeat facts. I wanted my language to capture a distinct sensibility, regardless of the subject. Put differently: if the words that I speak only express mathematical precision, the facts, so to speak, what’s the purpose of opening my mouth?
I do believe that you give away a little bit of yourself whenever you speak—your tendencies, your culture, your state—but I don’t believe that’s something to flee. When you tell a story, or simply give someone a message, the words you select and the way you enunciate your phrases conveys a sensibility, an impression, an audible identifier that’s connected to you, and the most fascinating people that you know expose what’s true and essential about themselves whenever they speak. So: what does it mean that so many people, in so many diverse occasions, feel compelled to pepper their sentences with exclamation points?
Elderly rhetoricians should halt at this sentence before they convulse while learning that some people, somehow, impossibly, use more exclamation points than periods when they write. My instinct as a reader is to imagine that these sentences are written by an incredibly skittish cat, where every tap, shadow, and footstep, results in wide-eyed terror. But I do try to consider how the language has shifted, and recognize that what I learned back in school no longer applies—because today’s exclamation points don’t really mark surprises, they’re not really used to express shock. Instead, what’s conveyed looks closer to agreement, or acceptance, especially in the way they arrive scattered throughout informal emails or quickly-written texts. They’re marks of comfort, warm blankets that ensure safety, harmony, and signal, implicitly, that the words just written weren’t meant with malice.
Language is tricky, ripe for misunderstanding, and written language only amplifies those problems. So there is something curious about how our age has taken the punctuation mark for astonishment and transmuted it to a mark of agreement. Whether this is a positive development in the evolution of language is a different topic, but we’ve certainly gone from a world with more understatement to one with more exaggeration. Nuance, wit, and metaphor are out; screaming with rage is, alas, in. And the fear, it seems to me, is that ‘see you tonight’ might be insufficient for our overly-heated climate, as it might look cold, perhaps apathetic, or it might accidentally suggest that something is afoot. Is something wrong? Are you sure? You seem distant? The appeal of ‘see you tonight!’ isn’t really that it expresses excitement—you’re not that exciting—but that it avoids misunderstanding. And we live in an age where giving offense, for many people, is the largest fear. Thus many people communicate as if they were customer service representatives, straining with a bright smile, desperate for a good review.
Regardless of whether this is a positive development—obviously, it isn’t—it creates another problem: we’re in an exclamation point arms race and you can’t be a pacifist. I learned to reserve exclamation points as the nuclear weapons of punctuation, but we’ve slipped from a world of deterrence to one of warfare—and I can’t continue with my old, correct, sensibility, because the contrast is too great. If everyone else writes ‘see you tonight!’, whenever there’s a funeral or hospital visit or court appearance, then my lack of exclamation looks like apathy, or even anger, as if I’m hiding something and not really interested in going out. Now the truth is that I am probably hiding something and not interested in going out, but that’s a completely different subject. I just find it peculiar that every utterance requires our most explosive weapon, and if that weapon isn’t deployed, if I don’t express my astonishment about lunch plans, then I convey indifference.
One lesson is that we’re all sharing this mysterious, evolving language that we call English, and that its conventions are social, contingent on your generation and class. I’m usually quite willing to accept that truth. The bizarre and sometimes bewildering fluctuations of communication standards are often the most artful. Or at least the most creative. Yet I just can’t get myself to accept these changes. I want to maintain subtlety, to take more care with my sentences, to express my surprise through my selection of words rather than my punctuation. So what should I do!
Hahah, well, you know I'm a sucker for an exclamation point and use them as liberally as Americans use salt. Your essay has spurred my thinking and my own assessment of my punctuation, and thus an essay of my own is brewing. Someone told me once that when they finally met me in person, all my exclamation points made sense. And please never fall into our present day trap of over-exclaiming because then your periodic punctuations of excitement wouldn't mean as much to your long distance friends! ;)
Both? The way I view it is that one of the best features of English is that it is alive! (I didn't want or need that exclamation point, I placed it there to be silly.) On some days I strongly prefer to read poetic, experimental, or even treatise type pieces, on others, I want an easy read. What I want to do on most days is to read. I appreciate and respect excellent English skills, yet I do not possess them. You, possess them. I respect and appreciate that.