How I stopped worrying and learned to love the exclamation mark

The first time I used an unnecessary exclamation mark in a text, it felt like a defeat. It was a rictus grin. Okay, world. You’ve worn me down. Here it is. Happy now? Because my exclamation mark in this case should emphasise how happy I am. Or as happy as I want you to think I am. Which is happier than I actually am, because I have just forced myself to use an unnecessary exclamation mark in this text.

It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe a couple of years, tops. Until then, my texts had been sprinkled with necessary punctuation. Question marks, obviously. Though never as a textspeak representation of the upward inflection of “Question marks, obviously?”.

Dashes were good too, but only when practical and – for neatness – didn’t render a text into Morse code.

Colons and semicolons were used because: the former are always handy; the latter a precious, sometimes maligned syntactical species that still has its uses.

Even parentheses would get their moment (as text, not emoticons).

But never, ever would I contemplate using the “xx” that too regularly rounded off professional work emails from people I had never even met. That felt utterly wrong, and even in this age of informality only feels right in very particular circumstances. Maybe it sounds puritanical, but I’m pretty sure that if you were to have even received, never mind sent, such a thing as recently as the 1980s you’d have been expected to go to Confession and cleanse yourself.

Compared to that, I had no gripe against the exclamation mark itself once it was used in the right circumstances. In texts and mails I had long grown used to the jolt as words rammed up against them, like a long train cascading into the buffers.

Nor did I have any issue with emoticons. There is a warmth to them that makes them hard to be cynical about. They’re an attempt to layer the cold words with emotion or empathy that a mere exclamation mark or three can’t convey.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t participate in them myself. As an Irish man, there would be a great danger that merely putting a smiley face, or a winking emoticon, or any such thing at the end of a text would unleash a flood of emotions that have been suppressed for five decades. If I was to use one emoticon, I might never stop.

Emojis are a whole other level. I have decided that the emoji is a generational thing, a divide I should never cross for fear of embarrassing myself. Yes, the emojis are on my phone, but they are not for me. They will never be for me. And they must never be used by me in any way that is not ironic.

My initial resistance to the exclamation mark was down to an intense dislike of their use in journalism. An exclamation mark should only be employed within quotes, and only then when the journalist is sure it was uttered.

Otherwise, seeing an article end in an exclamation mark suggests that the writer has been unable to get the message across adequately in the many words that preceded it. It is, as F Scott Fitzgerald once said, “like laughing at your own joke”.

So, when the moment came to use that exclamation mark in a text, thumb hovering over the key, it felt like a slipping of standards, a crumbling of resistance. It was the breaking of the dam.

Since which, I have learned to love the exclamation mark, to accept it as another shift in the evolution of written communication, allowable in texts, mails, Twitter – but still not journalism. Never in journalism.

But the mass deployment of the exclamation mark in personal communication has fuelled a shift in punctuation, an upward inflection of sorts, one of the new work-arounds that attempts to convey in written communication what would be clear if it were spoken.

It has perhaps become the prime beneficiary of the texting age, and sometimes it’s just easier to go with the ebb and flow of language shifts if they’re relatively harmless.

The danger, otherwise, is that you sound hollow, unimpressed and that the absence of an exclamation mark is what becomes noticed.

“Looking forward to seeing you” now sounds flat, jaded, almost insincere. Even if it’s not.

“Looking forward to seeing you!” has the expected enthusiasm.

“Looking forward to seeing you!!” ups the intensity in a way that should really be reserved for lovers or people who haven’t been seen for a year or more.

“Looking forward to seeing you!!!” You’re sounding a bit needy, now.

“Looking forward to seeing you!!!!” I’m thinking of maybe finding an excuse to cancel.

“Looking forward to seeing you!!!!!” Okay, now you’re just being sarcastic.

shegarty@irishtimes.com @shanehegarty