hHow do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gasps, howlers, dog cocks, or screams. In his Modern English usage, Fowler said that too much usage betrays an “uneducated or unpracticed writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno called them “soundless cymbal-crashing”. Novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you’re only allowed two or three words for every 100,000 words. He was generous.
Florence Hazratt notes that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Goebbels writing three of them in pencil in Hitler’s speech. Modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is described here as believing that “placing exclamation marks at the end of statements turns all utterances into shouting, and all thinking becomes organized”. She also ridicules male scholars who have complained about previous editors inserting exclamation marks into Beowulf’s speech on the grounds that it feminizes the hero.
Alas, what Hazrat really believed about exclamation marks can be inferred from his ultra-liberal use. “There’s no such thing as excessive Bible reading for an early-medieval monk!” A joke-badge runs the bracket. “Let no one claim that punctuation wasn’t sexy!” “The mind and the hand of the Pope – you couldn’t get very high in the Renaissance!” To be fair, this is a good observation: “All of Shakespeare’s tragedies contain at least one exclamation mark, while six comedies and two history plays contain none. It is not far-fetched to conclude that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, exclamations were expressions of intense distress rather than ‘spooky’ hysteria.” If the reader experiences intense distress upon encountering Hazrat’s own exclamation marks, they work as intended.
The happy result of the author’s exclamatory incontinence is that this book is not just a wacky usage guide of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves kind; This is a fascinating, extensively researched scholarly examination of punctuation throughout the centuries. After a brief prehistory about “interpuncts” (points between words in ancient languages) and the like, we observe a great renaissance of innovative marks designed to guide people through rhythm and intonation, and thus also understand the meaning of what they were reading. The semicolon, for example, was created by a Venetian master printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: “Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what you want from him. State your business briefly, and then leave immediately.” Hashtag life goals.
Of course, writers themselves always guard their punctuation rigorously. (“I insist entirely on this comma,” Baudelaire wrote, inserting back the removed comma on the page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or dashes at their own risk; Equally, Hazratt neatly shows how, by adding too many commas to a draft of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose. All this is evidence of his admirable insistence that punctuation is a part of writing, an essential component of style and the architecture of thought.
The book ends in the perfectly fluid present, when “it’s the tech giants who choose our writing tools”, and when ending a text message with a full stop comes across as rude. Emojis are not a language, Hazrat is right, but perhaps they are a form of punctuation, expanding the emotional possibilities at the end of a sentence. Most interestingly, she presents Donald Trump as a master of the rhetorical strategies provided by punctuation, with a Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and creative use of scare quotes, either to signal that Obama was not actually president or to draw attention to his own ridiculous euphemisms (his war was “our sweet ‘stay’ in Iran”).
What’s more disappointing is that Hazrat also analyzes the AI language model’s addiction to em dashes. Perhaps, she speculates, “the models were deliberately trained to appear human by imitating the naturalness of the voice – which is why dashes were so interesting to Renaissance playwrights like Ben Jonson”. Does their ubiquity now indicate an imminent “almost complete abandonment of the thinking function”? If it’s a choice between chatbots and Trump, I’d choose the orange human.
