skype for business group has yellow exclamation mark

Overuse of any punctuation mark tells us something about ourselves, in the same way overuse of any object does. But there’s fear, too, it cannot be denied: fear and sneer.

There’s admiration there, for sure, and wonderment, I think. It is anyone’s guess why the Tweeter of the Free World is so free with his exclamation points. No subtlety for the exclamation mark, unlike the ellipsis – spot those hidden ‘lips’ – with that sense of a kiss… The exclamation mark lacks the rigour of the life-breathing comma, sorting out our lives for us, bit by bit, and it certainly doesn’t have the pace of the dash – used so beautifully devastatingly by Emily Dickinson. The exclamation mark is certainly not an uncomplicated piece of punctuation: but this is no sophisticated colon ‘delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words’ (the Fowlers again) nor is this the ‘drooping moustache’ of the semicolon with a ‘gamey taste’ (Adorno). After the turn of the century, it was the lexicographer Fowler brothers, in their King’s English from 1906, who called for all quiet on the exclamation front, arguing in favour of the ‘lighter’, more minimal punctuation we still use today – a backlash against the grammatical excesses of their grandparents. Anton Chekhov even wrote a short story for them called The Exclamation Mark – about a paranoid civil servant, very unlike Trump, who in 40 years realised he hadn’t used an exclamation mark once. The Victorians had a real predilection for the exclamation mark. Punctuation marks in general, and exclamations in particular, were much more frequently used up until the end of the 19th Century. (For more on this fascinating history, I point you to David Crystal’s Making a Point.) (As a fan of punctuation, I’m rather fond of those cloak-and-dagger brackets.) It was the bibliophile Dr Johnson who then coined the term ‘exclamation’ for ‘pathetical’ sentences – those involving passions – from where it became the ‘exclamation point’ in the USA and ‘exclamation mark’ in Britain. In Randle Cotgrave’s French/English dictionary of 1611, the author describes it as ‘the point of admiration (and of detestation)’. In fact, the duplicity of the mark has been there for a long time. The idea of shifting from admiration to exclamation is telling: admiration is about something outside of you (‘Look at your achievement!’) exclamation is all about you (‘Aye me!’): the exclamation mark is the selfie of grammar.

Skype for business group has yellow exclamation mark