After the storming of the Washington Capitol on 6 January 2021, Donald Trump revelled in the violent mayhem. Two days later, he tweeted that his supporters “will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” Soon after, Twitter bowed to the pressure and banned its most famous user. It’s easy to see how the triple exclamation marks at the end of that tweet could have added more fuel to the fire. Trump inundated his Tweets with !, !!, !!!, and even !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (that’s 15 characters – someone was very angry that a foreign film won the best movie category at the Oscars in 2014). Such compulsion to ! did not go unnoticed: the Washington Post observed that Trump’s messages looked like “someone on the verge of a hysterical breakdown or a profound religious awakening”.
! shakes us awake. And that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. In a 2011 study, Utrecht social psychology professor Kees van den Bos did an fMRI scan on participants, examining which brain areas activate upon seeing an exclamation mark flash on a screen. Neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex fire up, responsible for judgment and alertness. It’s not panic yet, but the stage before, when we decide whether what we’re confronted with is unsettling enough to expend more attention and energy. The results of the cognitive study were confirmed in surveys that had the same participants assess moral issues. They played a game with an opponent (in reality a computer) who would withhold rewards from them after the game. When seeing a ! before judging their opponent’s actions, participants found the mismatch of give-and-take to be “very unfair” rather than just “unfair”.
Banning Trump made Twitter noticeably quieter. While he was reinstated in 2022 he has since declined to tweet, and we are yet to see if he takes the same approach with Facebook, after Meta's recent announcement that they intend to lift their ban. But the damage may already be done, and not only by the former President of the United States. Today, exclamation marks play an integral part in how we navigate Twitter. In the wake of the pandemic, and following misinformation about the 2020 US election being “stolen”, the platform installed a fact-check alert by adding a small blue exclamation mark in a circle at the bottom of potentially (or probably) misleading posts. The exclamation mark flags up that there’s something untoward going on. Beware!
But perhaps this recent usage unfairly maligns the exclamation mark, which has a long history that tells us something about the evolution of language itself.
thehistoryofpunctuation
Punctuation addresses the need to comprehend the text – both the sense of the words, as well as their emotional meaning. In classical times, writing was not a separate manifestation of language, but a mere record of speech. And since we don’t pause much between words when speaking (we do, just imperceptibly so), wordshadnospacesbetweenthemlikesomakingreadinghardandslow. An educated reader would have been able to figure out where one word ends and another starts, but learners would have had trouble.
Aristophanes, the head librarian of the venerable library of Alexandria in Greek-influenced Egypt, noticed that non-native Greek readers had problems navigating elaborate literary sentences. He pioneered punctuation by adding a dot at different levels of the line, flagging up the grammatical structure of a sentence and three kinds of pauses (long, medial and short).
It took hundreds of years, however, and the right kinds of choices by people in power (mainly popes and kings), to establish punctuation in the west. Gaelic-speaking scribes in ninth-century Ireland who copied out church texts in Latin slipped blanks between words, making it easier to understand the text, revolutionising reading and writing in the process. With the rise of more kingdoms, city states and global trade during the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, written communication moved out of the monastery and into the offices of merchants and messengers of states. Writing became worldly. It needed to offer quick and easy retrieval of the content of words, while also manoeuvring increasingly nuanced meanings that punctuation helped decode.
The question mark arrived sometime between the eighth and 13th century (depending on which shape one accepts as ?). It was the first sign to give guidance on how to read, rather than what. We don’t have to scan the context or spot interrogative words to know we’re dealing with a question.
It wasn’t long after this that the exclamation mark entered the scene. In the mid-14th century, Iacopo Alpoleio, a scholar from the small Italian town of Urbisaglia, composed a treatise on “The Art of Punctuation” and put a new mark forward: “seeing that the exclamatory or admirative sentences were pronounced in the same way as continuing or interrogative discourse, I acquired the habit of pointing the end of such sentences by means of a clear point, and a comma placed to the side above that same point.” That’s a bit like a full stop and an apostrophe earring, dangling from the top of the line.
Half a century later, in 1399, another Italian academic realised the form Alpoleio only described. Adding hand-written notes to the text he dictated to his secretary, the lawyer Coluccio Salutati put a spirited slanting / over a full stop, becoming the first person to exclaim in words. Coluccio was such a punctuation fan that he also invented the first parentheses in the very same manuscript (but that’s another story). Soon after, Coluccio’s !-shape hits those early printshops of Venice and Basel that were experimenting with the new technology from 1450 of printing text with movable letters. The exclamation mark’s survival is guaranteed through its inclusion in print type. But survival doesn’t mean understanding or confident use. Originally, ! was supposed to signal “exclamation” and “admiration” or wonder. What precisely does that mean, though? Would its use be only restricted to feelings suggesting something we’d call “wow!” today? Or could you also add a mark to all kinds of textual shouting like “hey!”, or “good sir!”, or “zounds!” (the Renaissance version of “fuck”)?
From suspicion to saturation
For a good 300 years after its first mention, neither readers, educators nor printers grasped quite what the exclamation mark was up to. In his 1611 English-French dictionary, Randal Cotgrave defined it as “the point of admiration (and detestation)”. The parenthesis testifies to the slippery nature of the mark, wriggling out of people’s reach and flying from marvel to disgust at the drop of a hat. And as if capitulating to the wayward ambiguity of the exclamation mark travelling up and down the spectrum of human emotion, 18th-century lexicographers like Dr Samuel Johnson allowed the sign to enlarge its sphere of influence to encompass any eruption of passion or “pathetical sentence”.
It seemed as though ! had made its mark. But after a brief stint as the perfect punctuation mark to express the delicate promptings of the heart of a Rousseau or an Austen, the exclamation mark lived a low life as a misunderstood and mistrusted exaggeration of emotion. In the hugely influential 1906 grammar manual The King’s English, the Fowler brothers sternly warn against that “excessive use of exclamation marks” which is “one of the things that betray the uneducated”.
War, however, makes no distinction between social classes: in propaganda posters of both sides in the Second World War, ! does double duty, both as attention-catcher and encouragement to stay alert. But its real natural home was perhaps yet to come.
Today’s social media is inextricably intertwined with internet technologies and smart phones. While typewriters as late as the 1970s did not have an extra key for !, requiring a laborious back-and-forth dance of typing a dot, backspacing, and adding an apostrophe above it (much as Alpoleio proposed), we can now produce any amount of !!!!!!!!!!!! simply by holding down our thumbs on our devices, and at no added cost whatsoever.
New technology has made ! ubiquitous. At the same time, it has powerful competitors. If the single exclamation mark encapsulates varied emotions in a voiceless faceless text from anger to admiration, emojis express a greater hue of feelings and feeling-situations in a more detailed way. Different kinds of laughing eyes, with or without tears, transmit more nuanced messages about emotion. Our sentences become shorter, less in need of punctuation traffic signs to orchestrate what we mean. Can you remember the last time you used a semicolon? Do we even remember what it’s for? Are emojis and texts killing punctuation?
Yes. And no. While it’s true that emojis have become so detailed and varied that they can (just about) convey the plot of a Shakespeare play without the crutch of the Bard’s own lines, they’re actually not useful for swift recognition of emotion. We need to pause that bit longer and scrutinise the small pictures. How does the sender intend that fire emoji to work in this particular context? That’s the same work of interpretation that is needed with the exclamation mark, but we’re much less burdened with ! and its single remarkable form.
It doesn’t seem like ! will be going anywhere soon, even if its biggest orange-faced fan has lost his favourite platform. And while it can be used to provoke outrage and panic, ! also has a softer side, which seems to do the opposite: soothing tensions and bringing people together. A 2006 study by researcher Carol Waseleski has shown how exclamation marks convey friendliness in chat rooms, bridging the gap between anonymous online communication and friendly presence. Take that, worry-mongers of Twitter! There’s nothing inherently good or bad about the exclamation mark. ! is what you make of it.
Florence Hazrat's “An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark!” is published by Profile.
This piece is from the New Humanist winter 2022 edition. Subscribe here.
