!exclamation mark

I really should write more and so I will. There’s simply loads of stuff to pen down but for now I’ll go with what’s on top of my mind.

In the first half of 2008 I interned at a software company called EMC Corp. I won’t go into the details of what I was doing there, suffice it to say that the work was coding related. A little bit of information though is required to make sense of what I’m going to be talking about. I was assigned the task of coding something called a ‘debugger extension’. In a nutshell, this piece of software involved running a set of commands and viewing the results thrown up by the extension. Now comes the interesting bit – suppose you had to run a command called ‘print’. What you would enter in the command window is - !print. And, this was read as being ‘bang print’. In essence, an exclamation mark was called as ‘bang’! Now I don’t know whether it’s because of this or something else but for a while now I’ve been monitoring people’s punctuation and particularly their usage of the exclamation mark.

Firstly, I don’t know whether I’m a bit unusual but I do attach some amount of value to correct punctuation and grammar. And this extends to the way in which I type my SMSes and GTalk chats. (I have put together a piece of writing about punctuation on this blog) A comma here and not there, some ellipses (three dots - …) at a place instead of a full stop, an emoticon for blank space and you get the drift can completely alter communication. Or maybe, people simply don’t read that carefully.

Coming to the exclamation mark now. I’m not a person who really favours it. Don’t really use it unless I really want to get a point across. The reason for that is simple. A sentence ending with an exclamation mark just seems to have all the emphasis at the end. It almost strikes one as if the writer is really being loud! (Now, I really had to use it there isn’t it.) Italicising words in a sentence strikes me as being a much better way of going about matters. The emphasis gets through neatly and no one’s left with ear ache. Sweet. However, there’s a slight problem. At least for the writing that I do on the job because for some reason that I don’t know, newspaper articles rarely use italics. And by newspaper articles I don’t exclude opinion articles or columns. Regular articles are supposed to be/supposedly neutral pieces of writing but opinionated articles should have italics wherever required, methinks. Would probably add a lot more emotion and emphasis in the places the author chooses rather than a one-size-fits-all exclamation mark. In fact, I just read a couple of column articles which did use italics so maybe it’s not as bad as it seems to me.

As far as people’s usage is concerned, here goes. I’ve noticed that a lot of people really favour the exclamation mark in their SMSes. (I’ve noticed that a lot of people really favour the exclamation mark in their SMSes! Naaaah, right? Glad you get it.) Maybe that’s got to do with the limited space and time that people have when they type out an SMS but I think it runs deeper than that. Maybe I’m being a touch judgemental here but it’s possible that they don’t really have what it takes to write what they actually want to and therefore opt for the ‘safe’ exclamation mark as the entire sentence gets emphasized or ‘banged’. I have another theory which goes somewhat like this. The chatting over the internet concept got really very popular when I was about 15. I have memories of a gang of us playing cricket in the courtyard of a house off Lansdowne and people scurrying off in a rush at around 8 PM. Reason? Because it was time to chat over the internet with folks from the girls’ school. Girls with whom they could have very well spoken over the telephone! I would imagine that the abstraction of the internet sure allowed for some solid conversation in the chat windows. Anyways, so maybe the exclamation habit kicked in from there and then. Of course emoticons weren’t really in at that time. And, the smiley’s been around for over 25 years now.

Maybe I’m reading a bit too much into how people type out their SMSes and chat messages. Maybe they simply don’t care. Maybe. One thing that I do know is that you hardly see exclamation marks in Hindi. At least I rarely did in the Hindi that I did in school. In Hindi, what you always do see is a good ol’ straight line with no gaps in it to allow for any shouting. What I also know is that however cold and lifeless code always seemed to me, someone sure as hell coded something correctly – the code for an exclamation mark. Bang, bang. Beautiful. Or was it just someone who really really liked ‘Kill Bill’. Really do beg your pardon, I simply couldn’t resist that.