In our war of words, full stops are dying but the exclamation mark is doing fine
Punctuation is so 1990s. The comma is disappearing, the full stop has come to a full stop, and the semicolon has been repurposed as a pair of winking eyes. While the exclamation mark remains in rude health, the fate of the apostrophe seems especially bleak. Even the Apostrophe Protection Society has given up the fight, calling an end to its activities in 2019 and declaring a victory for “ignorance and laziness”. Debates over the correct use of punctuation have raged since English printers began to adopt the fancy new marks to supplement the simple virgule of medieval scribes (the ancestor of today’s forward slash), used singularly to serve a range of functions.
The recent release of a large electronic corpus of written English from the past 30 years by Lancaster University allows us to track this rapid shift to a plainer prose. Short messages typed in haste dispense with old-fashioned commas and stuffy semicolons in favour of more informal dashes. Text messages now often sent as individual sentences mean the full stop has become surplus to requirement; including one is seen to signal a deliberate desire to be blunt or convey hostility, similar to adding the word “period” in speech: “That’s enough – period.”
Although being offended by a full stop is often framed as yet more evidence of the snowflakery of generation Z, they are not the only ones who can be intimidated by aggressive punctuation. In 2013, the US navy dropped its policy of requiring all communications to be written in capitals because its sailors objected to being constantly shouted at. It seems ironic that Donald Trump, known for his haphazard use of the upper-case – especially when identifying FAKE NEWS – has warned users of his new social media platform against excessive use of capital letters as part of its commitment to polite debate.
In recent years the debate over proper pointing has become especially polarised, as new technologies and an assortment of smiley faces threaten it with extinction. These changes in the uses of traditional punctuation marks are frequently reported as evidence of falling standards of literacy and sloppy grammar. During this summer’s examination season, some universities, considering the rules of standard English to be elitist, announced a decision not to penalise poor punctuation in assessments in an attempt to promote inclusivity. This decision to wage a “woke war” on standard English (in the words of the Daily Telegraph) has been robustly challenged by a recent report from the Office for Students, the higher education regulator, insisting that students be assessed on their proficiency in written English and that to do otherwise is to undermine the rigour of the assessment process. The punctuation won this one.
Another symbol that’s on its way out is the apostrophe, reflecting a much longer period of confusion over its correct use. The fact that it combines two functions – contraction and possession – makes it ripe for all kinds of misapplication, especially in its/it’s where those two uses come into conflict. Despite Lynne Truss’s desire to hack up those who muddle their itses and bury them in an unmarked grave, this is an entirely understandable mistake; in Shakespeare’s day “its” was correctly spelled “it’s”, reflecting its origin as a possessive form of the neuter pronoun “it”. Calls to drop the apostrophe go back to George Bernard Shaw, who refused to pepper his pages with these “uncouth bacilli”. Lewis Carroll took the opposite view, insisting that the proper spellings of “can’t” and “shan’t” should be “ca’n’t” and “sha’n’t”.
The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author would have despaired of the recent trend to omit the apostrophe in possessive plurals; in the case of an Australian man who complained about his employer’s unwillingness to pay his “employees superannuation”, the oversight could end up costing him dearly since he is being sued for defamation. Since he was referring only to himself, he should have written “employee’s”; the spelling without the apostrophe implied that the entire workforce had been disadvantaged. It seems that apostrophes do matter after all. Truss can hang up her axe; Carroll can stand down the Queen of Hearts. For now, at least, it seems apostrophes are safe.
The exception to this trend towards jettisoning these archaic dots and squiggles is the exclamation mark, which we are using more than ever. Originating in the middle ages as the
“point of admiration”, this has become more a point of self-admiration, or a means of laughing at one’s own jokes, in the words of F Scott Fitzgerald. But excessive use of exclamation marks (or “bangorrhea”, to use the correct medical term) isn’t simply driven by a desire to overhype our messages; instead, research shows that these marks now carry a range of functions. The exclamation mark was formerly restricted to identifying what Dr Johnson called “pathetical statements” (ones arousing our sympathies), a function reflected in its alternative monikers “astonisher”, “gasper”, “screamer” and “shriek”. Today we wield these marks when offering greetings and expressions of thanks, challenging a hostile viewpoint, trying to defuse an argument, or to bolster an apology: “Sorry, I’m too busy!”
The widespread use of exclamation marks to convey irony can be the source of some confusion. How should I respond to a tweet reading simply: “What a fascinating article!”? Perhaps this is the moment to resurrect one of many proposed devices to signal sarcasm: from the reversed exclamation mark of the 17th century to 2010’s SarcMark (similar to a reversed 6 with a dot in the middle). Ambrose Bierce, author of the Devil’s Dictionary (1911), coined the snigger point: a horizontal round bracket resembling a smile, thereby anticipating the emoticon. This has now been replaced by the upsidedown face emoji, an ingenious invention that has solved all our problems ⍫. These markers all suffer from a lack of widespread recognition, combined with the fact that irony is usually intended to be subtle and ambiguous. After all, if we really want to ensure that someone doesn’t misunderstand our teasingly playful comment, they can always simply say: “What a boring article!”
Simon Horobin is a professor in the Department of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford