Or Would You Mind Your English?

“CUT OUT ALL those exclamation marks,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald. “An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.” I quite clearly remember the only time I used an ungrammatical set of exclamation marks: !!!!!!!!!!!!. Quite naturally, not having had to pay for them per item, I do not remember the number of marks I used. I had not used them to terminate a sentence, but as a standin icon to communicate the falling of rain. Rain drops, to be more precise, their coming in sheets of broken lines, like Van Gogh paintings come to life, and then the lines condensing to a drop—exactly like! That was the first monsoon in my Facebook life, and since then, there have been downpours and water logging, but never the same flood of ! on my Timeline. For though I am quite certain that no one would call me a miser, I have to confess that I am quite tight fisted regarding my use of punctuations. Fowler’s Modern English Usage says that ‘except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational’. I am embarrassed to say that I judge people who use the exclamation mark as if it was a part of some buy-one-get-many-free package. I tend to think of it as adultery, this need for the many where one would suffice. I try to get inside the heads of those who use !!! like drivers honking their cars in India—as if control hee nahi hota. For every exclamation mark that comes after the first one is tautology, a repetition that is only noise. It’s easy to see that the use of multiple exclamation marks is the equivalent of shouting, uncontainable excitement or the shock of surprise, so numbing that your finger forgets to move from the 1/! key. The series of exclamation marks, then, marks the end of the era of quiet. It is loudspeaker version 3.0. What makes a human identify with the exclamation point then? My Facebook search engine tells me that there are five Facebookers with the name ‘Exclamation Mark’, and one with the name ‘Mark Exclamation’. While I thought that a nice surname (I would have liked to be ‘Sumana Full Stop’ though if I had a choice), it was their profile photos that I was more curious about: quite expectedly, three of the six had ! as their profile photos (in blue, black and red), one had the Facebook default photo of a woman, and two had Roman gladiators as their profile photos. Of the six, four were men. It came to me like an epiphany: the exclamation mark on Facebook was loaded with masculinity. I could not quite understand how that had come to be. The history and etymology of the punctuation mark betrayed no such bias. ‘!’ derived from the Latin for ‘joy’, and surely that was not a male exclusive? The female Facebooker had used the ! in her profile photo between parenthesis so that (!) looked like a woman’s back to many. The comments about the figurative butt were not very polite. But this evidence of masculinity is at odds with available research on the subject. Karl Hughes, in a short piece that cites studies by Carol Scates, Mary Hiatt, Laura Winn, Donald Rubin, among other researchers asked, ‘Why do Young Women Abuse the Exclamation Point?’, quotes comments from his Facebook post, one of which is this one by a Meghan Callahan: ‘I think women often don’t feel heard. It’s a way to add emphasis and force attention, for people who don’t understand how to do that through craft’. While this might be true of America where Hughes is based, in India, where women are anyway less heard than men, I have not noticed any significant difference between exclamation mark abuse by male and female Facebookers. For in Indian English, the ! is expected to do what the ellipses does in poetry – a stand-in for the unsaid and the unsayable. Stuart Jeffries, in his essay, The Joy of Exclamation Marks, says that “without the flourish of an exclamation mark”, anything we say “lacks verve or at least zeitgeisty voguishness.” Quoting David Shipley and Will Schwalbe from their recent book, Send: The Essential guide to Email for Office and Home: ‘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’. Before you can think of whether old world telegrams ever used the exclamation mark, Jeffries offers you an anecdote: “One day Victor Hugo sent a telegram to his publisher. He wanted to know how his new book was doing. His telegram read: ‘?’; the publisher’s reply: ‘!’” The exclamation mark, you see, meant Hugo’s book was doing well.’ There are other delights in Jeffries’s essay, as in this quotation from Terry Pratchett: “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” Jen Doll, in an essay, A Plea for Self-Control Regarding the Exclamation Point, writes about her English tutor teaching her the value of the exclamation mark: In 10th grade, as a response to the most recent assignment of fiveparagraph personal essays answering the gem of a prompt, talk about one important thing of your summer, my English teacher began the class with the single most important lesson I learned in high school: “From here on out, you only get seven exclamation marks in your life, so use them wisely.” I was floored. At that point in my life, I had yet to deal with anything that long-term. This was my Aladdin / three wishes moment. I was nervous, but also excited. The English teacher’s aphoristic statement reminded me of a diabetic friend’s self-mocking joke about the consumption of sugar: “Its destiny, decided at birth—how many kilos of sugar one is entitled to consume in this lifetime. Some do that in 30 years, some in 60, another in 90.” I’ve increasingly begun to ration my use of exclamation marks—every day isn’t Sugar Saturday. What happens to all the ! after they’ve performed their duties? Do they die? A century hence, an archaeologist might discover a cemetery of ! on Facebook. Who knows, after the wars over gas and water, there might be restrictions on these weapons of mass exclamation. What would happen, then, to my favourite exclamation- point Facebooker who goes by the name ‘!ndia’?