Exclamation marks and colons
From James Thurber’s The Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Guide to Modern English Usage,
The New Yorker 1931.
It is my contention that a colon could almost always be used in place of an exclamation point. Its use as a symbol of passionate expression is not, I’ll grant you, well known, and yet it lends itself to finer shadings of excitement than the exclamation mark, which after all is a hybrid composed, on most typewriters, by striking, successively, the period, the back-spacer, and the apostrophe. This process of synthesis usually takes from six to eight seconds and is very frequently complicated by accidentally striking the upper-case shift-lock key, thus setting the machine so that it writes solely in capitals. In this way a person, after making his exclamation mark, will sometimes go on to write six or eight sentences in capital letters without realizing he is doing it. He then either has to go back over those sentences and draw a diagonal line across each letter — the proofreader’s sign for “restore to lower case” — or else, if he lets the capitalized words stand, he must enclose a separate note explaining what happened. All this takes time, and diverts a writer’s mind from what he was trying to say. Furthermore, by following his exclamation mark with several lines of capitalized sentences, screaming and bawling across the page, he has made the exclamation mark seem ridiculous and ineffective. The best way to avoid all these complications is to use a pen or pencil. This is, however, the era of the typewriter — even love letters are written on typewriters. Thus it will be helpful to learn that the colon, which is typed by striking only one key, can be employed in place of the exclamation mark in almost any given sentence where the emotion one wishes to express is of an amatory nature.
Take the sentence “You are wonderful!” That’s trite, and it’s made triter by the exclamation point, but if one writes it thus: “You are: wonderful,” it’s certainly not trite and it has a richness that the other hadn’t or hasn’t — “hadn’t” is better, I guess. Nothing so closely resembles the catch in the voice of the lover as that very colon. Instead of shouting the word “wonderful,” as the exclamation point does, it forces a choking pause before that word, thus giving an effect of tense, nervous endearment, which is certainly what the writer is after. Of course whether he should be after that effect, no matter how the sentence is punctuated, is a separate problem.
