Stuart Jeffries: Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what's happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?
See also, Tom Bissell, on DFW: In the autumn of 2005, an e-mail message with the unpromising subject header “Thought you’d like this!!!” landed in my in-box. The sender, a family friend, was an incurable forwarder of two-year-old John Kerry jokes, alerts for nonexistent computer viruses and poetry about strangers who turn out to be Jesus. This latest offering contained not the expected link to a YouTube video of yawning kittens but several dozen paragraphs of unsigned, chaotically formatted text. It bore this title: “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address — May 21, 2005.” Before I had reached the end of the first paragraph I believed I could identify the author. A quick search verified it: The commencement speaker for Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005 was, indeed, David Foster Wallace.
The joy of exclamation marks! |
