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[narrator] Every day around the world,
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millions struggle with the same question:
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to exclamation point
or not to exclamation point?
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Exclamation points are friendly.
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But they can also be too friendly.
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They show you're excited,
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but can also make it seem
like you're shouting.
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In a work email, they lighten the tone,
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but you can also look less serious.
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And if you don't use exclamation points,
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sometimes you risk seeming mean.
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You wrote, "Myra had the baby,"
but you didn't use an exclamation point.
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[Narrator] Elaine once got dumped over it.
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I would put exclamation points
at the ends of all of these sentences!
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On this one and on that one!
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You can put one on this one:
I'm leaving!
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[Narrator] The way they're perceived
in a professional setting
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can vary widely depending on gender.
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When sent by a female co-worker,
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nearly half of male respondents found
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the use of exclamation points
in this email to be very professional.
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But when that same email
was sent by a man,
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that number dropped significantly.
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Humans are communicators and innovators.
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We sent a man to the moon.
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But we only have
three ways to end a sentence.
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Exclamation points
are everywhere in popular culture,
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even though it's not totally clear
what they mean.
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Why is the exclamation point so confusing?
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And is there something better?
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[man 1] It's a bird! It's a plane!!
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-Don't do it for me. Do it for the paper.
-Scram, Svengali!
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Where are the people?
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I am the greatest!
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[Alex Trebek] This is Jeopardy!
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Keep America great, exclamation point!
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And they text to each other.
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They don't need to know spelling.
Don't need grammar.
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Only you can prevent forest fires!
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It's an exclamation point!
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It's a line with a dot under it.
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[Narrator] Who better to help us
understand how to use an exclamation point
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than the high priests of punctuation:
copy editors?
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And what better way to get
the unvarnished truth
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than at a copy editor
conference cocktail hour?
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Hey! Your team won the game.
That's fantastic!
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Egads!
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Holy shit!
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Or I'm pregnant! Or I got divorced!
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I'm not any of these things. Wow.
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You get one exclamation mark
in your career. Use it wisely.
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In editing school, they told me
to use them minimally.
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And I didn't listen...
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because I think they're dope.
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If you use multiple exclamation marks,
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you sound like
an overexcited 14-year-old.
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Professional correspondence,
I wouldn't use it more than two times.
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I use the exclamation mark personally...
all the time.
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Like, it's really egregious
and I really need to get help for it.
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[Narrator] But the question of how to use
an exclamation point used to be simple.
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You put exclamation points
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after exclamations.
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Words like "lo," "hark," "behold"
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that are meant to grab
the reader's attention.
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The Italian poet Iacopo Alpoleio
da Urbisaglia claimed to have invented it.
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In the Renaissance, there was the sense
of the contemporary culture
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being broken or decayed,
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and needing to go back
and find a better foundation
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for the arts and culture and society.
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[narrator] And they turned to antiquity,
to ancient Athens and Rome,
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and to orators like Cicero.
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Da Urgisaglia decided
to mark his exclamations
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to indicate the livelier way
they should be read aloud.
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He called his creation
the punctus admirativus,
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or the punctus exclamativus.
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[Weiskott]
"I began noting the ends of such clauses
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with a plain punctus
and a comma placed lengthwise above it."
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[Narrator] The new punctus took off
and was used this way for centuries.
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By the 1700s, the Spanish had
standardized turning it upside down
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and also placing it out in front.
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Missionaries and European colonial powers
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spread its use across the globe
and on to dozens of languages.
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But applying exclamation points
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to written traditions that didn't
originally have them could be tricky.
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When one of the great masterpieces
of Old English, Beowulf,
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was rediscovered in the early 1800s,
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many editors debated whether or not
to apply an exclamation point
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to the poem's first word.
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[Narrator] What?
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[Weiskott] "Hwæt!" which means listen up,
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or, in rap music,
it's kind of like "yo!" or "heyo!"
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[Narrator] Beowulf is a pretty different
story depending on how you punctuate it.
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Listen! We have heard
about the glory of the Spear-Danes,
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the kings of tribes, in days of yore,
how the noblemen performed brave deeds!
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If that exclamation point is there,
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the narrator is pretty jazzed
about this past.
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[Narrator] No other punctuation has
the same power as the exclamation point
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to signal a feeling.
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[Weiskott]
By the time you get to the 18th century,
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people started using it
not just for grammar,
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but also for tone.
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"My friend! This conduct amazes me!"
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[Narrator] Great American authors,
like Herman Melville,
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embrace the exclamation point
to convey passion.
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His classic, Moby Dick, had 1,683.
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[man] "I can see that figure now--
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pallidly neat, pitiably respectable,
incurably forlorn!"
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[Narrator] But then, after 1920,
the exclamation point became uncool.
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Writers are starting
to associate the exclamation mark
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on the one hand, with the sensational
headlines of the yellow press,
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and on the other, with
the sentimental novels written by women.
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[narrator] Like Mrs. Southworth.
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[Nunberg] In either case,
the exclamation mark is unmanly.
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It's disdained.
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[narrator] And one of the most influential
writers around this time
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was also one of the manliest,
Ernest Hemingway.
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The Old Man and the Sea had one.
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Hemingway's contemporary
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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appears to have succumbed to the pressure.
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In her memoir of their affair,
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Sheila Graham
claimed Fitzgerald once told her,
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"Cut out all these exclamation points.
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An exclamation point
is like laughing at your own joke."
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It's an attitude that persists
among writers even today.
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[man] I think the exclamation point
is a little useless.
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It adds a sort of unnecessary weight
to the end of a sentence.
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And so I've steered away from them
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in my personal writing
and my professional writing.
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[Narrator] Writers may have shunned
the exclamation point,
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but not everybody did.
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Advertising took the exclamation point
and ran with it,
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in order to get your attention
to sell ya stuff.
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From the 1930s to the 1940s and '50s,
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the number of print ads
with exclamation points in them doubled.
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And while advertising was having this
love affair with the exclamation point,
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one of the most successful
punctuation innovations was born:
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the interrobang.
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[woman] There has never been a symbol
that used both of them as one symbol.
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It was always
two or three pieces of type,
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which is pretty inelegant.
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[Narrator] Penny and her late husband,
Martin Speckter,
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ran a successful ad agency
during the Mad Men era of advertising.
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We met in September,
got married in December.
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I used to go dancing and drinking,
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and he didn't drink and he didn't dance.
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So I had to find other interests.
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One of those interests
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was working on a small typography magazine
called Type Talks.
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We were at dinner one night,
and he was lacking four pages.
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And all of a sudden,
he thought of the interrobang.
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So he called the art studio
that we used,
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and he said, "Is anybody there around
who can draw?"
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And we went over.
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We were there till
about three o'clock in the morning.
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And he came up with a number
of versions of the interrobang.
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The name combined "interro"
for interrogate
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and "bang" for exclamation point,
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a slang term that's said
to have emerged from comic books.
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[Narrator] Martin Speckter's interrobang
got off to a promising start.
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It was included
in the popular font Americana
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and as an option on multiple typewriters.
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It was even the title
of a 1969 Italian erotic thriller.
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Would you like to make love to him? What is this never-ending interrogation?
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Redesigning the exclamation point
seemed like it might hold the solution.
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"LET'S PLUCK THE BIRD"
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The French writer Hervé Bazin
introduced the acclamation point,
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a demonstration of goodwill or welcome;
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the conviction point,
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if you need to say something
with unwavering certainty;
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and the authority point, to share
your sentence with a note of expertise.
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But none of these, nor the interrobang,
caught on, because they came too late.
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A different design trend
had already taken hold.
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[Nunberg] The famous Doyle Dane ads
for Volkswagen
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that popularized
the Bug in the early 1960s
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went in absolutely the other direction.
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[Narrator] VW ushered in
the simplicity of Helvetica and a period,
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in direct opposition
to competitors like Chevrolet.
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In print ads, their usage plummeted,
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yet in TV shows based on comic books,
they became iconic.
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[Nunberg] You look at the original
Batman show on television,
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where they're saying, "Wham,"
and little balloons are going up.
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So we can appreciate these things
always with you understanding
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that we really don't
take them too seriously.
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And that's what allows people to use it,
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but always with a sense of,
"I don't really mean this."
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Exclamation points appeared
in the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein,
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popular musical titles,
and for the first time, campaign slogans,
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until finally
the bubble burst with satire.
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Popular culture in that period becomes
almost an obsession of American culture,
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but always with one or another form
of detachment.
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It's ironic. It's campy.
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And this culture shift
coincided with another:
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women's advancement in the workplace.
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In a position of authority,
a woman has two requirements to fulfill.
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If she fulfills the expectations
to be a good woman,
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she will be liked,
but she will be underestimated.
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If she fulfills the requirements of
a manager or leader, she'll be respected,
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but she will probably be called
that word that starts with "b."
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[Narrator] Periods were direct
and could seem stern.
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Exclamation points became code for nice.
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I ask you, for example,
"Do you want to go out tonight?"
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and you say, "Yeah."
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I don't think you really want to.
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Yeah!
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You need to be enthusiastic
to really mean it in writing.
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If you don't have an exclamation point,
it's like you don't mean it.
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And for many women,
in fact, you need multiple ones.
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[Narrator] In a 2006 study,
the only study ever done on this,
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nearly three-quarters of all exclamation
points in online correspondence
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were used by women.
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But that didn't mean the exclamation point
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didn't stop indicating
passion or irony either...
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or volume, commands,
action, warning, surprise,
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and of course, exclamations, like the tweets of Donald Trump.
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[Trump] During the day,
if I'm in the office,
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I have a number of people
that I'll just call out a tweet to.
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-You call out, "Exclamation point!"
-I do.
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[Narrator] The exclamation point
hasn't so much evolved over time
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so much as it's accumulated meaning.
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[Parham] There's so many meanings
that we've put onto it, right?
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And so it can kind of be anything,
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and in that sense,
it's become kind of nothing.
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[Narrator] Writing each other constantly
over email, text, and social media,
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it's changed how we communicate.
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and in a lot of ways,
the exclamation point
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is having a heyday on the internet.
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[Parham] "Report: Kanye West is forced
to move in with Kris Jenner...
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by Kim Kardashian!"
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It's so ridiculous.
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You'll see something like
a Bossip or a Media Takeout headline
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that is totally exaggerated,
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which is also adopting this type
of internet language and internet speak
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in a very unique and interesting way.
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But online, it's just fun.
Let's just have some fun with it.
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On Twitter, I'll put
five exclamation points in a tweet
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just because it's, like--
it's kind of silly.
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That's kind of the point too. You're
kind of trying to play up the emotion.
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[Narrator] But online and on our phone,
we now have lots of ways to convey tone.
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[Tannen] Emoticons, emojis, memes, gifs.
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All these ways of saying,
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"Don't take what I just said literally
and don't think it's in any way negative."
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A lot of it is just showing goodwill,
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but now that there is
so much conversation going on online
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that especially older people worry,
and that's always been the case,
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they feel like
this is license-plate language.
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LOL, for example,
or LMAO, laughing my... butt off.
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IDK for I don't know.
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And many of us linguists point out
we've always had that.
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For example, FYI, ASAP.
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But I think it's just the same process
of language changing and adapting
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to the current needs.
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Language and writing
are supposed to be fluid,
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and it's supposed to be tenuous.
You're supposed to be able to stretch it.
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But, in a lot of ways, the internet
is still very new and young