Behold the exclamation point! It’s a handy thing to have and use! It adds excitement to each and every sentence that you write! Over-using it is like reading a conversation with someone high on espresso and crack! Caution is advised! On the computer, however, the exclamation point means more than a frantic writing style!

I subscribed to MAD Magazine for years when I was a kid (back when it was good). MAD was a great satirical rag, and inspired a lot of my humor that I’ve written since — including the original DOS For Dummies.

Upon reading MAD one afternoon, I noticed that all the written text in the magazine, every sentence, ended in an exclamation point. In all the cartoon bubbles, not a single period. It turns out that was sort of a comic book tradition, but it began my long writing career with the exclamation point, or exclamation mark as it’s often called.

A former English teacher, who helped hone my early writing skills, cautioned me about using the exclamation point. “Don’t over do it,” she said. Because of my MAD experience, I tended to end too many sentences with a ! and not a period. So I pulled back.

When I got a computer, and learned to program, I noticed that the exclamation point was used more than just to mean something exciting. Due to the limited availability of characters on the keyboard, the ! became employed in a number of different ways. Mix that in with computer people eager to save valuable typing and speaking molecules and the term “exclamation point” became passé.

For example, back in the old ARPAnet days, the ! was used as a separator in an e-mail address. It was pronounced bang. So my email address was once ...crash!dang, which is pronounced, “crash bang dang.” Even today, many programmers will refer to the ! as a bang.

In programming, the ! is often used to mean “not,” as in !=, which means “not equal” or the common !important, which means “not important.”

Here are some additional ! trivial bits:

• The first ! appeared about 600 years ago. No one knows the exact origin or how it came to be.
• The ! character was not a common typewriter character. On typewriters that lacked a ! character you typed a period, then backspaced, then typed an apostrophe to produce an exclamation point.
• Grammar teachers explain that you need only one ! at the end of a sentence. For informal writing, however, it’s common for people to type more than one ! to add extra emphasis. (I agree with the grammarians here; too many exclamation points dilutes their potency.)
• In some languages, such as Spanish, a sentence ending in ! must begin with ¡, which is an inverted exclamation point (not a little I). The character is produced on international PC keyboards by pressing AltGr+1; on the Mac you press Option+1 to see the ¡.
• In mathematics, a number suffixed by ! indicates a factorial. So 3! means 3 x 2 x 1 or 6.
• Other computer names for ! include pling, shriek, and screamer.

Even more curious than the ! is the !? character, which is known as the interrobang. More on that next post.