America Has a Love Affair With Exclamation Points!

Crazy! Lol!! Super!!! In a nation of ecstasists that uses expressions like great to describe everything from a cup of coffee to a night’s sleep, it isn’t surprising that these cute punctuation marks—called “bang,” “wonderer,” and “screamer”—pop up just about everywhere to denote an unrestrained enthusiasm, though some see them as gendered expressions of emotion and others, mostly Gen Z, as passé. It wasn’t always this way. We got the exclamation point from the British, along all things verbal. Yet the British are at a loss as to how they entered their parlance in the first place. Some argue, inconclusively, that they date back to the 18th century, derived from the Latin interjection Iō! (“hey!”),” which medieval monks, through a process of decantation, redesigned by placing the o below the l, then shrinking it until it was just a dot. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Hebrew Bible doesn’t use punctuation, so none are there. English-language translators, though, in their savvy creativity, have reversed the absence: the Revised Standard Version (Anglicized Edition) of the Old Testament has 1,087, and the New, 395. “Alas! what harm doth appearance / When it is false in existence!,” Geoffrey Chaucer utters in The Canterbury Tales, in order to display candor. And the exclamation point makes an appearance in Shakespeare’s First Folio, although spari...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Evergreen freelance Psychology Source Type: news