Wishing to be something is one thing - wishing not to be something is quite another. While people have written many a best selling book on the former, the latter scenario is unattainable.

This is because the grand sweep of time churned by the gears that grind slowly, but grind exceedingly small, will ensure that you will end up being that something else at some point in your life.

I had always thought that I would never become a proliferator of exclamation marks. But just the other day, I used not one, but two exclamation marks in a communication. The resulting sense of shame has burnt searing scars across my every atom that makes up the fiber of my being.

It is small consolation - but I am not alone. Over the years, the population of P.O.E.M.s in our society has grown steeply. Today, it has become an epidemic and increased numbers of P.O.E.M.s flow dangerously across our hallways and buildings in short rhetorical bursts.

Who among us has not received a communication that utilizes exclamation marks not as an accessory, but as a life saving prop to complete a sentence? I receive hundreds every day. Here's one from a communication that hit my inbox today:

Good morning! It was great to receive your email yesterday! Stay in touch and take care!! Oh...and by the way, I hope the weather remains sunny for the next two weeks!!!!!!! Speak to you soon!!!

The first emotion a person experiences after reading such an email is disbelief sparked by the perfectly plausible question: How can anyone be so impossibly happy?

It is only when you see that very P.O.E.M weeping tears into a latte at a coffee shop, or witness his or her picture underneath a newspaper headline that proclaims "Angry Worker Lets Loose on Seven", do you realize that happiness might not be the culprit generating these forests of perpendicular punctuations.

What then is behind the sudden deluge of exclamation marks? How did we end up as a race incapable of endings with a more placid state of mind?

It is not as if we have always been a race that has evolved by expressing itself in heightened intonations.   A cursory look through the correspondences of the years gone by reveals an extreme paucity of exclamation marks.

I searched extensively fin the history books for a "Thank you for your letter!!!", but there was no mind from the past that had recorded feelings for posterity in such an excitable manner. The norm for our ancestors has been to utilize dignified full stops, commas and when forced - semicolons.

To give just one example, here's how the famous British poet John Biltjaman began to a letter to his friend not very long ago.

It was great to receive your letter. It was a breath of valour scented air after all this Guinness with journalists and high tea at Killney with the editor of the pro-German Catholic paper.

As many of our modern day P.O.E.M.s do, Mr. Biltjaman thanks his friend for his earlier correspondence.

However, he does not use an exclamation mark to illustrate and complete his point. Doing so would have allowed Mr. Biltjaman to treat this thought as completed and his mind would have been free to lazily chase after another thought.

But Mr. Biltjaman stays the course and explains that his friend's letter served up many delights after many harrowing experiences:

1. Guinness with journalists (where he mixed boring with pleasure)
2. Having tea at Killney (not as good as the tea in Darjeeling or for that matter the town of Earl Gray)
3. Sipping the tea in question with the editor of the pro-German Catholic paper. (who can surely drive any human being right back to Guinness).

After reading this explanation, would his friend have any doubt that Mr. Biltjaman was not indeed delighted to receive the letter?

Can we then not have a world where more and more people never have any doubts about the fruits of their delightful actions? How can we escape this hidden scourge of exclamation marks that is eating away at the foundations for good communication - surely an essential requisite for any society to flourish?

We can start by being thoughtful, and refusing to carry the disease of small talk from our arena of spoken interaction to the written realm. A desire to be honest and detailed can send a harpoon into the most stubborn of these punctuations.

But it is not easy. Even the most cognizant can slip into these cunning traps of habit.

I recently wrote to an acquaintance over the Internet that "I enjoyed his writing!"

This was a lie. I had no definite thoughts regarding my acquaintance's writing. I didn't know enough about his writing to elucidate about the high Guinnesses, the tea bags that and boring editors that were responsible for his turns of phrases and feasts of reason.

Using the exclamation mark allowed me to convey a feeling of substance, of which in this regard (and many others), my mind had none. By using the exclamation mark, I acted dishonestly and did a disservice not only to myself, but also my acquaintance.

He would have no doubt appreciated a follow-up question for information that would have allowed me to form an opinion. All he got instead was an exclamation mark.  

Don't get me wrong. I am not against the usage of exclamation marks - I am only opposed to their proliferation.

We can certainly use exclamation marks when they add to our already honest and detailed sentiments and thoughts. National anthems and speeches urging people to strike are good cases in point.

Take the case of the US National Anthem (as written on the White House web site):

O'er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there.

Wouldn't this have read better with an exclamation mark, as follows:

O'er the ramparts we watched
Were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare
The bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there!

Precisely.

top

© COPYRIGHT 2002-2012 Arun Krishnan