David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, in their 2007 email etiquette guide Send, were particularly prescient. But there were some who welcomed our enthusiastic new punctuation overlords. There was never any shortage of exclamation points online, nor a shortage of curmudgeons to bemoan their ubiquity. (I’m sure I’ve already spent beyond my means, don’t email me.) The writer Elmore Leonard had a similar rule for fiction: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose,” he once wrote, though he apparently didn’t abide by that. You could, perhaps, spend your one exclamation point on a headline like “WAR OVER!” but nothing less would merit one. One grammar guide from 2005 says the exclamation point “indicates extreme pain, fear, astonishment, anger, disgust, or yelling.” At journalism school, I was told that you get one exclamation point to use in your entire career, so you should use it wisely. It wasn’t so long ago that a single exclamation point still felt extreme. But this time it’s happening to punctuation. This sort of inflation is a natural linguistic phenomenon that regularly happens to words, like how awesome was once reserved for that which truly struck awe into a quavering heart and is now scarcely more than a verbal thumbs up. “All of these quirks of social media-that would include exclamation points, and all caps, and repetition of letters, those are the three main ones that show enthusiasm-people use more of them,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.
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