![]() Bridgeport public housing tenants facing 'eviction tsunami'.Periods didn’t always show up well on pulp pages, leaving Spider-Man to ramble on to the Green Goblin in run-on sentences. ![]() Apparently, they served a purpose all along. ![]() The true superhero of the industry was Stan Lee, who tried to ban them in the 1970s. Pick up a contemporaneous comic book and the marks end every single sentence. So the Bright Night gets points for proper grammar.īatman’s print counterpart and peers … not so much. And, by the way, the likes of “URKKK” definitely seem worthy. I grew up watching the 1960s “ Batman” TV series, which punctuated fight scenes with “Z-ZWAP!” “WHAMMM!” “VRONK!” “FLRBBBB!” etc.Įven in this use of onomatopoeia, the writers usually used only single exclamation points (there were exceptions, such as “ZGRPPP!!”). I’ll send the ransom money if you’ll please just stop.Ĭolin and I traced the secret origin of my disdain to comic books. The result is typically something like “It’s ridiculous that OUR TOWN would be asked to help the town next door!!!!!!” They try to underscore their chosen theme first by bolding it, then italicizing, and so on. There seems to be no limit to the emphasis some writers resort to in the interest of making a point. Moving to the Opinion pages in recent years meant adapting to the writing of contributors. ![]() A student in a class my wife and I teach at UConn recently stepped to the board and wrote a news lede that ended with an exclamation point. My issue is when they are misused, like Tom Cruise in a Jack Reacher flick.Īlso, I was groomed in the news department, where summoning an exclamation point is recognized and damned as an expression of opinion. In full transparency, there’s no hiding that I occasionally use exclamation points. “I told my wife I thought about trying to hire Steven Wright to come in and fill in for me and just do the whole segment like Eeyore, just erase all the exclamation points,” I offered by way of introduction. Up until now, our relationship has been limited to emails (non-spoiler alert: One of us tends to use more of these - !!!!!! - than the other). The radio spot also meant that after four years, Colin and I finally got to have a conversation. Scott Fitzgerald (“An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke”), Elmore Leonard (“You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose”) and “ Seinfeld” are on my team, though no one has made the case better than the recent takedown in a “ Baroness von Sketch Show” segment. Yeah, it was like stepping to the mic after Renee Fleming, Leontyne Price and Adele and warbling “Louie Louie.” “I guess Colin wanted to go a little low-brow by having you on.” “They are smart women,” my wife, Lisa, accurately opined. I’m getting the sense I’m the only person on the latter side of this Point-Counterpoint discourse. Exclamation points are trumpets of exaltation of a job well done. If that wasn’t enough, he snuck in a poem from colleague Chion Wolf, who hosts “Audacious” for Connecticut Public Radio (“They are the blast of stadium lights when a rock band hits the chorus. First came Florence Hazrat, a literary researcher who authored the forthcoming book, “ An Admirable Point: A Brief History of The Exclamation Mark,” followed by Lan Samantha Chang, director of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Then he and segment producer Betsy Kaplan (whose idea this was) stacked the deck with the other guests. Listen to "The Colin McEnroe Show" episode about exclamation points at /show/the-colin-mcenroe-show See More Collapse
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