The Exclamation Point

I have always been of the opinion, with Thurber, that the exclamation point should be avoided, if not actually shunned, in print, as in real life. You may find this thought alien if you are one of those people who respond to casual demure questions like “how are you?” with “Super!”, but I can tell you know that there isn’t much that we’re going to agree on and this relationship is going nowhere, except for your really hot body, which is perfect and gives glory to Allah just walking around.

I feel the same way about the exclamation point as I do about a lot of mainstream male-oriented representations of heterosexual intercourse: it places emphasis on exactly the wrong things in the wrong way. In fact a lot of mainstream male-oriented representations of heterosexual intercourse is so terrible it makes heterosexuality itself seem like a bad thing, and a bad thing that happens when you’re eighteen and in an RV surrounded by a lot of dudes in baseball caps. As representations go, imagine a world in which advertisements for hot dogs consisted entirely of 300 pound men in eating contests to the death and you have the image given by most mainstream pornography.

Not that I have seen such things.

The exclamation point is not much better. The mark itself is just a horrible phallocratic giveaway:[!]. It consists of a long, solitary shaft which has onanisticaly yielded a small, pale rapidly cooling spot of graphematical excess that belies its original passion. By itself, the exclamation is a sad and lonely thing that tries to conceal its profound hollowness with a lot of extroverted noise. It is the Tigger of punctuation marks.

Worse still, the exclamation point will sometime band together with other exclamation points in the inferior erotic narrative:

“I can’t believe it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My flippers are so dirty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I must have gotten them dirty when I walked across that erotic cake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Of our Founding Fathers!!!!!!!!! Evacuating!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You know what I mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So dirty!!!!!!!!!!!!!Won’t you please lick them!!!!!!!! Clean!!!!!!!! OHHHH YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NNNnhhh!!!!!!!!”

The effect of these multiple exclamation points is not so much arousal, or the communication of arousal, as it is short graphic stretches of pointy fencing that warn the reader to “stay away.”

The exclamation point, LIKE ALL CAPS, is really an entire language of bad pornography. And to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. This form of life has a name: it is fascism.

For it is only in an imaginary perfect fascist state that all men have ROCK HARD BATTERING RAMS and all women are TOTAL SLUTS who WANT IT REALLY BAD and ALL THE TIME: “OH, YES!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!!!! PUT THE DUSTBUSTER ON MY CLIT!!!!!!!!!!!!”

In short, any conventions that appear in spam should be avoided.