Heck Of A Guy

According to Daphne Merkin, one author of The Female Thing at Slate.com,

Helen Gurley Brown once said that
exclamation marks were the sexiest form of punctuation

The good news is that this claim has not caused me to reverse or revise my pro-feminist stance.

Nor, however, has it altered my contention that, in 95% of cases, planting an exclamation mark¹ on paper is suspiciously similar to laughing at ones own joke.²

In the seasonal spirit of peace and reconciliation, I offer this homebrewed, non-standard, usage criterion to exclamation mark enthusiasts (exclamarxists?) everywhere:

An exclamation mark is the method of last resort to call attention to a statement.

If any other method of alerting the reader is feasible, use it.

If the content itself isn’t sufficient, if the phrasing doesn’t do it, if it’s a case in which one can’t risk the reader not noticing something, well, don’t hesitate to then keyboard in a “shift+1″ or take pen in hand to ink in a calligraphic slash-dot. Even the most punctilious punctuation pontificator can hardly object to a writer metaphorically shouting “Fire!” to garner the attention of those in danger.

Otherwise, for goodness sake, show some self-discipline.

Is This A Gurly Thing That I Won’t Understand?

To be fair (or, even better, to give the appearance of fairness), this allegation (i.e., that Helen Gurley Brown once said that exclamation marks were the sexiest form of punctuation), which I have not been able to independently corroborate, was used in reference to the style of writing characteristic of Cosmopolitan magazine.

In that context, one supposes, associating the exclamation mark with sexiness could be considered a coding implicitly clear to Cosmo readers and authors; or perhaps new subscribers to that periodical receive a Cosmo Culture Handbook that includes a handy table of standard symbols of this ilk for the reader’s convenience, not unlike those guides that enlighten college freshmen baffled by James Joyce’s cryptic language in Ulysses.

And, one cannot discount the possibility that it is the phallic presentation of the “!” that links it with visions of copulation dancing through ones head. I would readily concede that it is the most priapic punctuation.

On consideration, in fact, I would be willing to stipulate to the use of the exclamation mark to denote sexiness if all other uses of the mark were prohibited. That wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but, pragmatically, it would at least eliminate the “I don’t know why I put the exclamation mark there; but you know what I mean” usage that predominates now.

Still, the “! = sexy” equation does raise questions.

For example, does this mean that the hitherto dreaded multiple exclamation marks convention (e.g., “He’s so cute!!!!!!!!!”)³ actually indicate multi-orgasmic episodes, each exclamation mark serving as a marker on a orgasm tally sheet?

Does the exclamation mark have exclusive access to the sexiness arena? It seems to me, for instance, that if the exclamation mark is the sexiest punctuation, then the semi-colon has a claim for the kinkiest.

There’s sexy and there’s sexy. Is an exclamation mark George Clooney sexy, Mick Jagger sexy, Pamela Anderson (allegedly) sexy, Hale Berry sexy, Leonard Cohen sexy, … . And that’s just “sexy” as in “sexy star.” Does the same exclamation mark cover sexy cars, sexy songs, sexy lingerie, sexy psychiatrist-bloggers? Is one piece-o-punctuation truly sufficient for all these variations?

And, of course, there is that eternal question: does size (of font) matter?

1. By the way, does the term, “exclamation point” make sense to anybody? It seems to be used as often or even more often than “exclamation mark,” (Google shows 1,110,000 hits for “exclamation point” versus 974,000 for “exclamation mark”) but surely “!” is a mark rather than a point.↩
2. My full perspective on exclamation mark usage is exhaustively elaborated in my definitive, albeit unpublished, psycholinguistic treatise, “Exclamation Marks Suck,” which was earlier unpublished under the title, “This Is The Only Legitimate Use Of An Exclamation Mark!” and which is not soon to be made into a movie, “Die Exclamation Mark Die.”↩
3. My contention is that using multiple, non-ironic, exclamation marks is a sign of habituation, little different from the alcoholic who needs an ever-increasing number of drinks to recapture the high that a single martini originally triggered. Just say no.↩