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HHow do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, howlers, dog cocks, or howlers. In his book Modern English Usage, Fowler argued that the usage of plural suggests “an illiterate or uneducated writer”. Martin Amis called them “comedy badges”, and Theodor Adorno “silent cymbals”. Author Elmore Leonard once said that you are only allowed two or three for every 100,000 words. He was generous.
Florence Hazrat says that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Goebbels writing three pencils of Hitler’s words. Modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is quoted here as believing that “slapping punctuation marks at the end of sentences turns all words into exclamations, and all thought into order”. At the same time he mocks male scholars who have complained about previous editors who put exclamation points in Beowulf’s text thinking they were honoring the hero.
What Hazrat really believed about shouting, alas, can be inferred from his very liberal use of it. There’s no such thing as extreme Bible reading for medieval monks! it manages one element of humor. “Let there be no one who can say that the punctuation marks were not fornication!” “Imagination is the hand of the pope – you can’t get too high in the Renaissance!” To be honest, this is a good idea: “All of Shakespeare’s tragedies have one clue, while six plays and historical plays have nothing. If the readers have to suffer a lot when they encounter the signs of Hazrat, then they work as they want.
An interesting result of the author’s restraint is that the book does not just use the standard Eats, Shoots & Leaves guide; is a fascinating, well-researched study of symptomatology over many years. After a brief history of the words “interpuncts” (dots between words in ancient languages) and the like, we see in the Renaissance the development of new signs designed to guide people through the tone and tone of words, and the idea of what they were reading. For example, the semicolon was invented by a Venetian printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: “Whoever you are, Aldo repeatedly asks you what you want from him. Hashtag life goals.”
Authors are always fiercely protective of their characters. (“I insist absolutely on the comma,” wrote Baudelaire, inserting a page extract in the proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or strokes at their peril; Similarly, Hazrat clearly shows how, by adding tons of commas to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, his first editor did violence to the powerful prose breaks. This is all evidence of his impressive insistence that punctuation is a part of writing itself, an essential part of style and structure of thought.
The book ends with an all-liquid, when “technological giants choose our writing instruments”, and at the end of the message and completely stop it comes as an insult. Emoji is not a language, Hazrat rightly observes, but rather a form of punctuation, expanding the possibilities at the end of a sentence. Most interestingly, he portrays Donald Trump as a master of the communication methods provided by letters, with his Goebbels-like tendency to exaggerate and his use of threatening words either to imply that Obama was not a real president or to draw attention to his stupid words (his war was our beautiful “stay” in Iran).
Worryingly, Hazrat also examines the trend of AI language models down to the em list. Perhaps, he thinks, “the models have been deliberately trained to look like people based on the sound of words – precisely why lines were so interesting to Renaissance playwrights like Ben Jonson”. Does their omnipresence now indicate that the “retirement of thinking” is coming soon? If I’m choosing between chatbots and Trump, I choose the orange guy.
