Of course I started with Elements of Style by Strunk and White and later with Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss, who did not become a short-lived prime minister of England. That was Linda Truss.
Add to this collection of books on the vexations of punctuation now comes An Admirable Point by Florence Hazrat 175 pages from Godine, $17.95, about the exclamation mark. Priscilla M. Jensen recently reviewed the book for the WSJ, 'The Mark of Excitement,' which is how I know about it.
The great thing about print and online copy is that the print copy is where I start, and the online copy is where I go for the color photos and artwork. The above cartoonish WOW!!! is found in the online version of the book review. It would never fly in the print edition.
To a person like Florence Hazrat, a British (what else), a scholar of the Renaissance Florence, 175 pages on a blot and a dot is likely child's play.
We get the story of its origins when in the 14th-century Italian poet and scholar (what else), Iacopo Alpolelo da Urbisaglia considered that a "clear point," and a comma placed on its side above that same point might provide "punctus admirativus" (of course) to a text.
Of course that was the beginning. We now know the exclamation point to be a tapered tear drop hanging over a dot, or period. It's sort of like an upside down earring, except when the text is Spanish, and it starts the sentence as an earring and an upside down exclamation mark. (For another time.)
Nothing sets the refined mind off more than an opinion about the use of punctuation and how they find it used. Ms. Jensen's review of Florence Hazrat's book was in the edition dated April 7 and it didn't take long before the WSJ printed a letter (April 13) from a reader that revealed a somewhat violent reaction to the use of the exclamation mark.
Edgar Issacs of Salisbury, MD tells us: Priscilla Jensen's review of "An Admirable Point: A brief History of the Exclamation Mark by Florence Hazrat (Bookshelf, April 7) reminds me of something the novelist D. Keith Mano wrote in National Review in 1975: "The exclamation point may be used in dialogue and then only if the person has recently been disemboweled."
Wow!!! The tense seems a little off. If you've recently been disemboweled, I doubt you might then have a use for the exclamation mark other than to yell, "Ouch, that hurts!"
As I said, strong views of punctuation and word use are not uncommon. I keep a framed July 17, 2001 note I received from Russell Baker here in front of me that was a typed reply to my query to him on the use of the hyphen, which I pointed out at the time seemed to have disappeared, leaving us with words that once were hyphenated, but are now smashed together with no dash separating them. Mr Baker replied:
"After awhile it no longer seems worthwhile to keep fighting. I surrendered to hyphen idiocy years ago before leaving the Times.
I confess that I still rage against the jamming together of words to form corporate entities, as in PBS's Newshour, for instance. There are more born every day. It's a byproduct of internetaddresstalk.gabble, I guess. When one of these appears I think you can be excused for shooting on sight without asking questions."
Both Mr. Baker and Mr. Mano advocate death to offenders. No trial.
Ms. Jensen's review gives us examples of reactions to the mark by writers and others sprinkled in Ms. Hazrat's book.
Leonard Elmore proposed to allow two or three exclamation marks per 100,000 words. Cormac McCarthy has said that punctuation consists of "weird little marks that block the page."
I have no idea of the frequency of my own use. I've composed over 1,750 of these postings since 2009 and have no idea how often I've used the mark. I doubt it would show to be excessive. I recently used it in a Tweet to Joe Drape, a sports reporter for the NYT when two horse racing stories appeared in the sports section in the same week. I've expressed strong disappointment to the paper on the paucity of its local sports coverage. My Tweet went:
"TWO horse racing stories in the same week! Do you guys have a new editor? "Mr. Drape did not respond, and I'm not surprised.
My own use of the mark I think is confined when I'm meaning to express astonishment, as in "can you believe WTF just happened?" (I'm not spelling this out to order to avoid Google's AI community standards algorithm for spotting explicit text. The appearance of the f-word in my text might touch off the sensors and cause Google to place my posting behind an "Explicit Warning" prompt, requiring the reader to acknowledge there's naughtiness to follow. AI gone too far, which is a shame. Richard Burton once declared that the f-word was the single greatest word in Anglo-Saxon speech. Four little letters. So much meaning. There's way more to his story, which someday I might share.)
In fact, I was astonished! that the word astonishment did not find its way into the book review. I'm going to have to buy the book and see if it has found its way into Ms. Hazrat's book.
Donald Trump's use of the mark is of course fodder for comment, as so many things that man does are an excess of sane usage. His Tweets, when he was doing them, invariably had double, and often triple exclamation marks. Typical overkill.
Lynne Truss in her Cutting a Dash chapter touches on the exclamation mark, or point, as we say in the States. She's for it, with moderation. She offers an example of Victor Hugo telegraphing his publisher asking about the sales of his recently published Les Misérables who received the simple reply "!" A mark that replaces words. How can you hate it?
Benjamin Dreyer offers a few very specific edicts on the use of exclamation points. No. 63 reveals more about the character of Donald Trump than anyone realized. Mr. Dreyer tells us: "No one over the age of ten who is not actively engaged in the writing of comic books should end any sentence with a double exclamation point or question mark." Unsaid, but implied, a triple mark is beyond heresy. Should be shot on sight.
In three years of high school, 10th-12th grades, I took the equivalent of 4½ years of various math courses through electives. It will be interesting to see if Ms. Hazrat has anything to say about the math notation using the ! point. In math, orthographically the symbol ! means factorial. What?
5! means all the permutations of five numbers: 5,4,3,2,1. Permutations means the multiplication of all the possibilities of how 5 numbers can be arranged. 5! gives us 5×4×3×2×1, or 120 possible combinations.
When I was in high school in the '60s, pari-mutuel betting on horses did not include exactas, triples, or superfectas, picking two, three or four horses in the exact order of finish. Thus, in high school we weren't exposed to the betting tactic of betting called "boxing," taking your selections and in effect betting all possible finish outcomes in order to hit the bet and still (hopefully) win money.
My introduction to playing horses came two years after graduating high school and a few years before the exacta bet and other "exotic" wagers became a staple of New York Racing Association (NYRA) wagering. A common "box" bet it to take two selections and bet them to finish in either order. Thus, two selections becomes two bets, one bet that is an automatic loser if the other bet wins. Both bets of course can lose, as is often the case.
Exactas have appeal because they can pay more than what the winner pays, basically because you're trying to pick a more precise event than just picking a winner. You're picking the winner and the second place horse. You're doing 2!.
Use three horses in your selection process and you're doing 3! This equates to 3×2×1=6 selections, only one of which you win your bet, or none (Excluding a dead heat; for another discussion).
The more selections you choose to box, the more your bet costs, and the greater the likelihood that the cost of your bet will not be rewarded with a payout greater than your outlay. You could box 6 horses in an exacta, but that would cost you $30 in dollar bets (6×5×30). Most one dollar exacta payouts do not exceed $30, even with a moderate long shot in there.
In a triple, picking the order of the first three finishers using 4 horses in your selections costs you 4×3×2=$24 in dollar bets. While triples pay better than exactas, they are commensurately harder to hit. In that example, three of your four selections need to cross the wire first, second or third. Sharpshooting.
And by dint of mathematics, superfectas, picking the first four horses to cross the wire are even harder to hit. There is no ardent horseplayer no matter their education level who isn't good at math.
I have to say, I have never read a racing text that described "boxing" as betting factorially, but you are.
I will say though that my take on hitting a boxed exacta is generally what Victor Hugo's publisher told him: !
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